STUDIES IN CONDUCT 



GEORGE THOMAS SMART 




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STUDIES 
IN CONDUCT 

BY GEORGE THOMAS SMART, D.D. 




1905 

THE PILGRIM PRESS: BOSTON 

NEW YORK & CHICAGO 






LIBRARY Of OONSRESS 
Two Copies rtocw^oo 

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Copyright, 1905 
By George Thomas Smart 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 027735 



Companion an& f nterpreter 
&S tbe TOa^ 



APOLOGIA 

The following pages are more or less con- 
fessional and elegiac. They do not reflect, 
however, upon the conduct of life in any tech- 
nical way. That is aside from their purpose. 
But the discriminating will gather that they 
are not unaffected by some great confluent 
streams of modern thought. They spring 
from a sympathy with the Romantic Mood in 
literature. In philosophy their goal is Ideal- 
istic. In religion they deem the Christ to be 
the master of those who know. 

G. T. S. 

Newton Highlands, 
Massachusetts. 



CONTENTS 



I. 


The Furniture of Earth . 


9 


II. 


The Body 


25 


III. 


The Mind 


41 


IV. 


The Spirit 


55 


V. 


The Age of Wonder and Trust 


69 


VI. 


The Years of Imagination 


81 


VII. 


The Storm and Stress Period 


93 


VIII. 


The Days of Work and Wine . 


105 


IX. 


The Time of Reflection . 


117 


X. 


The Field of Memory 


129 


XL 


The Rest That Remaineth 


139 


XII. 


The Choir of Heaven . 


151 



"When, therefore, you would represent to your mind 
how Christians ought to live unto God, and in what 
degrees of wisdom and holiness they ought to use the 
things of this life, you must not look at the world, but 
you must look up to God, and the society of Angels, 
and think what wisdom and holiness is fit to prepare 
you for such a state of glory. You must look to all 
the highest precepts of the Gospel, you must examine 
yourself by the spirit of Christ, you must think how 
the wisest men in the world have lived, you must think 
how departed souls would live if they were again to 
act the short part of human life; you must think what 
degrees of wisdom and holiness you will wish for, 

when you are leaving the world." 

William Law. 



"The World in which we live and move 
Outlasts aversion, outlasts love, 
Outlasts each effort, interest, hope, 
Remorse, grief, joy; — and were the scope 
Of these affections wider made, 
Man still would see, and see disma^y'd, 
Beyond his passions' widest range, 
Far regions of eternal change. 
Nay, and since death, which wipes out man, 
Finds him with many an unsolved plan, 
With much unknown, and much untried, 
Wonder not dead, and thirst not dried, 
Still gazing on the ever full 
Eternal mundane spectacle — 
This world in which we draw our breath, 
In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death." 

Matthew Arnold. 



THE FURNITURE OF EARTH 



STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

CHAPTER I 

THE FURNITURE OF EARTH 

I 

The spirit of man, like the fabled scholar of 
the Renaissance, assumes all knowledge to be 
its province, and all experience to be its right. 
It is ever trying and tasting to see what is 
good, — sometimes the unquenchable foun- 
tains of the spirit, sometimes the burning 
draughts from that nether world, so thinly 
sealed over for most of us. Hardy indeed is 
this eternal voyager. Alas, that so often it 
should come to grief! 

What a world this is for every one of us! 
Contemporary life smites us in every conceiv- 
able way. In a deeper sense than appertains 
to the savage we are all under the despotism 
of the moment, — only our moment is more 
spacious than his, while no less vivid. Men 
esteem less than they used to do whatever is 
old; only the highest degree of immediacy 
moves our fellows, who hunger and thirst after 

ii 



12 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

novelty. Men feel themselves, in the present 
moment, the heirs of all the ages, and the head 
and front of a nobler posterity, as well as the 
depositaries of all the motions, aspirations and 
knowledge of the ends of the earth. 

This present world has many aspects. One 
is the substantial front of nature, which, 
though depending upon change and phenom- 
ena, leaves an impression of persistence that 
defies the obstinacy of man. Mighty cities now 
lie in ruins, like flocks of sleeping camels. No 
man is escaped to tell their tale; but nature 
in its own way utters the awful word "Time," 
whose tooth has done her work. 

In spite, however, of all these changing 
features, nature has permanent qualities, and 
of these probably the first to strike men is that 
of power. Face to face with its tyranny the 
early man quailed before its irascible moods. 
He built himself propitiatory shrines upon 
which he poured sacrificial wine to persuade 
the demons of the thunder-storm, or the black- 
ening frost, to pass by his waving fields. 
Power was superseded by a grace that drew 
the enchanted gaze of poets. The terrible 
mountains — men called them horrible as late 



THE FURNITURE OF EARTH 13 

as the eighteenth century — at times lost their 
minatory aspect, especially when the sun-rays 
made their crests a road to the celestial city. 
Heine sings of the Jungfrau's golden hair. 
The sea too is not altogether the whitener of 
men's bones, for the poets deliver it as the 
birthplace of lovely Venus. And in our own 
age the poet sees the meanest flower that blows 
illustrate the deepest questions of life. Grace 
in its turn is superseded by utility. Splendid 
examples of the fact have been furnished to 
man, such as the overflowing of the Nile and 
the fruitfulness of the regions irrigated; but 
only since Roger Bacon, have men seriously 
set about hitching their wagons to a star. 
Nature as the field of utility is a growing 
conception to an age like our own, beyond 
any other in daring invention and scientific 
knowledge. 

The soul, moreover, is born into a world of 
personality. This, perhaps, it feels earliest, so 
that we see children, as well as men who 
remain such, willingly imputing to nature the 
soul that it lacks. Origen never could under- 
stand how the planets could keep their ap- 
pointed places, if they did not have souls to 



i 4 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

direct them; and just in the same way the 
child beats a chair that has fallen upon it, for 
how should anything hurt him if it did not 
mean to do so and had not the will as well as 
the power ? 

As we begin to think, nay, before, as we be- 
gin to feel, we touch personality in a deeper 
sense than this. Every one feels the impres- 
sion of parents, and biographers are instinc- 
tively right in beginning the story of a man's 
life with his ancestry; but there are other 
persons that impress us and perhaps the more 
because we only meet them at intervals. The 
visitor of our father's house, who sits at meat 
with us, whom we as children look upon as one 
from far-off lands, though he may only come 
from the next town or the next street, never 
utters a word that falls upon stony ground, so 
long as we are by. The policeman on the cor- 
ner, who may know of the window I broke the 
other day and perhaps stolidly awaits my com- 
ing only to hale me to prison all the easier, is 
an impression never lost. And the great names 
among men arrest us : — George Washington, 
of whom we once remember hearing a man say 
that he could have lied, — a saying to be de- 



THE FURNITURE OF EARTH 15 

nied with tears and protestations of his more 
than human innocence; — Gladstone, whose 
voice surely must have sounded like musical 
glasses; — and Bismarck, who in an imagina- 
tion of the Seventies, was always clanking a 
long cavalry sword and drinking beef tea; for 
somehow beef and iron usurped the place of 
blood and iron in his stern formula of govern- 
ment. Thus we begin to feel an acute certainty 
of personality, always in the concrete form of 
overpowering individuals, but most certainly 
effective. 

The state also claims the soul, or rather, as 
Augustine affirmed, the soul claims the state, 
while it is on the journey to the City of God; 
and the state is one of the most clamorous con- 
testants for our ears of any of the struggling 
forces of the day. For some of us the earliest 
impression of it was the arrest of a criminal 
(children are always present) ; or the bared 
head of a prince of the blood who opened the 
first park laid out in an English city; or, in 
America, the sight of Mr. Blaine speaking 
from a car in a railroad station. Little by little 
we take up the cries of party, accurately align- 
ing ourselves with our parents in the political 



16 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

wars that soonest of all wars become ancient 
history. Later we grow into a more doubtful 
mood; for we find that princes are not always 
gentlemen, and that "silver-tongued orators" 
do not make statesmen. Possibly we change 
sides, to find that the other side is bad too. 
At last we say, "The state is wrong." And 
growing more intimate with years, we respect 
the state less, and seek to purify it in Quixotic 
fashion. 

We, moreover, touch the contemporary re- 
ligion. The world we are born into is a 
religious world, deriving its faith from almost 
as many quarters as Rome in its most eclectic 
age. And this religious world is all the more 
impressive, since in the case of Christianity it 
is historical, personal, ideal, and has more to 
say about the volcanic passions than any other 
authority. Christianity came with us all the 
way from the beginning; the thought of God 
stretches into the earliest years of childhood, 
and the face of Christ haunted us long before 
we saw it on imperishable canvas in Italy. 
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy," — a 
possession the most stricken and sin-cursed 
would never absolutely forego. 



THE FURNITURE OF EARTH 17 

II 

Contemporaneousness, large though the fact 
may be, is not the whole of the world which 
forms the theater of our action. 

There is, as well, the recessional world of 
history and tradition, that was recited to us as 
children in the tales of a grandfather. We 
were easily set agape for more ; so we plunged 
into history so highly colored that the facts 
were ignored, only later to go to the other 
extreme, and read history so dry that we do 
not care what the facts are. This world has 
enchantments to which we gladly give our- 
selves up whenever we can drop the tasks of 
life. 

It is no small realm, or petty duchy, but is 
as deep as the human heart and boundless as 
imagination. Its first form in consciousness 
is lyrical. The song our nurses sing, or the 
crooning that we make ourselves, has histori- 
cal events for its burden. The world is richer 
to the child that sings "Dr. Foster went to 
Glo'ster," for then he learns that others have 
a proprietary right in the world as well as he, 
and that they too have to learn by sad experi- 
ence. Then we travel on to the time when we 



18 STUDIES IN CONDUCT "" 

can read the retrospective psalms, or we can 
enjoy Percy's Reliques, or sing some Border 
song of Scotland. 

The story of history, however, is not wholly 
written in lyric form. From lyric we go on 
to epic. We learn about the worthy Mr. Gil- 
pin; then perhaps, as schoolboys, we make 
acquaintance with Paradise Lost and the birch 
together, wallowing in a worse than Serbonian 
bog; but meantime we are snatching fearful 
joys with Walter Scott, or, not able, and not 
caring, to distinguish verisimilitude from fact, 
we dwell contentedly with Crusoe on his 
island. And then, suddenly, we realize that 
contemporary life is making history, and so 
reach the third phase of the recessional world. 

This is the dramatic presentation of life. 
Even as children, to preface a speech with 
"Says he," made it ten times more living. Man 
does not lose his primal instincts, though often 
they get covered over, and thus he loves history 
as drama. I venture that men love and know 
the history of Shakespeare's age better than 
any other because it is written in matchless 
drama. The age of Anne may conceivably fall 
into oblivion; one cannot conceive it of the age 



THE FURNITURE OF EARTH 19 

of Elizabeth. In the Bible the dramatic quality 
of Hebrew history makes for power. The 
characters themselves are always talking. The 
historian does not moralize at tedious length. 

Ill 
We should be glad indeed to escape the 
world of the subliminal if we could, but as 
little children we are brought close to its hectic 
life. We may first meet it in ourselves as we 
fall from grace and are punished, not alone for 
wrong, — that has been common in the past, 
— but for a certain demonic perverseness in 
wrong that makes a father look sad as well as 
stern. Or we may meet it, most touching to 
us, in the person of what the law austerely 
calls the "juvenile offender." One such in- 
stance I recall as a boy. A child of the streets 
rang my father's door-bell. It was not the first 
time he had thus offended. At last he was 
caught, and his struggles and protestations 
were, to my childish mind, like those of a gob- 
lin damned, as the boy was told that we had 
sent for a policeman. The officer came, and 
after carrying the tragedy far enough to 
affright the urchin he was allowed to go. 



20 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

This was my first consciousness of the sublim- 
inal world of sin. 

The facts of this world are of differing 
emphasis. Some of them constitute only "good 
substantive misdemeanours," as Robert Louis 
Stevenson would say, and not capital offences, 
when men do wrong unknowingly, with hurt 
to their fellows, breaking the law in gaiety 
as they interpret its meaning with easy affabil- 
ity. Others run up against the barriers of law, 
and one sees, if he does not feel it himself, the 
smiting force of this organized weapon. 

But it is tragedy that sets the heart ajar. 
We meet it in childish periodicals, or early 
learn to know it in Shakespeare, — perhaps see 
its sinister face among our known acquaint- 
ance; but when we do see it we have been 
thrust by pity and emotion out of our child- 
hood into our youth. For, though children 
compendiously hang half-a-dozen dolls at a 
sitting, and bury them withal, they do not feel 
the essential sting of tragedy, which is loss. 
In time we step into this world of shadow and 
conflagration and we are initiated into life. 
Vicariously we tread beyond the gates of Eden, 
and while we weep for the smothered Desde- 



THE FURNITURE OF EARTH 21 

mona, or Moses who was denied Canaan, we 
cry out with the arch-offender, "My punish- 
ment is greater than I can bear." 

This subliminal world is not all vicarious, 
or tangible — would God it were! — it is also 
essential We do not alone enter it, for it 
finds a place within us. Hot-eyed days we all 
remember, too many of them, when the trail of 
the serpent scorched our path. We could not 
weep at our shame, though our eyes were 
ready to burst from their sockets; heaven 
above was brass, earth beneath, iron; men's 
faces were averted from us and the eyes of 
women no longer blessed us. If glances fell 
upon us, they only fell to shatter us like light- 
ning, or to make public for a moment the hor- 
ror that we would hide. "Why hast thou 
forsaken me?" we cried to the universe. Its 
palpitating love was grown cold. The world 
was mere slag — a heap of cinders. 

For some of us repentance came, sad-faced 
as an undertaker, to put away the dead past, 
and then we arose to walk in newness of life. 
It was no more a newness of accident such as 
had attracted us in the past, but life developed 
a new essence. We no longer sat at tables 



22 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

loaded with delicates from every clime; but 
we did drink from unquenched fountains. We 
were not innocent; but we were justified. 
Though righteousness was gone for ever, holi- 
ness awaited its place. Ending our merriment 
with shadows, we became the familiars of real- 
ity, and the new way that we walked was 
lighted by love. 

IV 

And so we reach the last phase of our con- 
temporary world: the ideal. We shall see 
it more closely in succeeding chapters, but 
we must note some of its marks before we 
proceed. 

At first, and indeed all through the stages 
of life, we find the world heightened by love. 
The love of the home emphasized all our little 
talents so that most wonderful prophecies were 
made about us when we spelled words of three 
letters, or added sums whose total did not 
exceed four. At the very least we were to be 
lawyers or ministers: no hard round of daily 
toil for us ! And we, believing the prophecies, 
proceeded to treat the world as already won, 
and conquered better for our belief. 



THE FURNITURE OF EARTH 23 

It is the same with the lover. He discovers 
that some one else believes in him and by deli- 
cate signs avers that the world only waits to 
be won, indeed is won; for the gift of a true 
heart is hardest to win, and therefore shall not 
the smaller goods be added to it? This also 
has been the secret of those who have been 
beloved of God. One could live in a poor 
chamber with Spinoza and grind lenses for a 
livelihood if one could only be as sure as he of 
God. A man would gladly walk hard and 
craggy paths if he could know as Enoch did 
that God walked with him. The mystery of 
godliness in a life like St. Paul's loses some of 
its occult strangeness when we remember the 
mystery of love that inspired it. The love of 
God for his saints has made them confident. 
They have seen the increasing purpose of the 
mind of God. 

There is another stage of the ideal life in 
the joy of heroism. Men love the heroic and 
will cheer to the echo the brave man, though 
they are cowards themselves. They would 
give much to be a Sidney or a Nelson. And 
women admire Lady Jane Grey. Many long 
to join the company of those who have made 



24 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

and increased the worth of life. Heroism has 
its gunpowder age for most of us, but for some 
there comes the apostolic order that takes pos- 
session of a man with fasting and prayer. We 
serve our apprenticeship to Walter Scott and 
Charlotte Bronte, but later we learn, "They 
also serve who only stand and wait." After 
the thorny Areopagitica follows Paradise Lost. 
After the storms of John's youth there comes 
the vision of the sea of glass. 

Thus we stand within the sanctuary of the 
ideal — devoutness. There are lives so refined 
with joy and glory that men are utterly unable 
to explain them, and yet they never can resist 
the delightful task of attempting them. Plato, 
Aurelius, Plotinus, Augustine were among 
such who dwelt in the schools; David, the 
writer of Job, Paul and John were among 
those recorded in Scripture. Over and over 
again we attack them, over and over again we 
give them up. Their lives surely are too high 
for us. And yet we want to be like them ; we 
would wrest their secret from them if we could. 

Surely the world we are born into is amply 
furnished. 



THE BODY 



"The whole Creation is a mystery, and particularly 
that of Man. At the blast of His mouth were the rest 
of the Creatures made, and at His bare word they 
started out of nothing: but in the frame of man (as 
the Text describes it,) He played the sensible operator, 
and seemed not so much to create, as make him." 

Sir Thomas Browne. 



CHAPTER II 

THE BODY 

I 

With many people the outstanding fact of 
consciousness is the existence of their own 
body. It is ubiquitous in the course of their 
thought, and yet they give it slight considera- 
tion so far as sanity and clearness are con- 
cerned. Few are as wise as Jowett, who at 
seventy-six began to study it, after being in- 
different to it all the allotted years of life. 
Though ever in the foreground of conscious- 
ness, it is rarely consistently dealt with, and 
men vacillate in their relation to it from the 
extreme of indifference to that of glorification. 

The body is of great interest to the devout 
soul bcause it has always been one of the 
critical factors in life. Sometimes, in real 
humility and wonder the heart has cried, 
"What is man, that thou art mindful of him ?" 
and sometimes, under the stress of war, "O 
wretched man that I am! who shall deliver 

*7 



28 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

me out of the body of this death?" From 
Eden downwards, the bodily senses have been 
leaders in the destruction of the soul's peace. 
Though men veil the outlines of the ceaseless 
battle that goes on in the religious conscious- 
ness by esthetic terms, with many it is the 
imperishably ancient instincts of the body 
which mark the line of battle. 

II 

There have been many different attitudes of 
the soul to the body. Sometimes one extreme 
has been taken, sometimes another; rarely the 
golden mean, and then only for a moment. 

The savage, standing first in time, is the 
subject of momentary impulses. His body is 
the Egyptian taskmaster overtopping all his 
consciousness. He is enervated by the warm 
sun-rays and so lolls on the slopes of time, 
regardless of the winter that steals sure-foot- 
edly behind. Growing hungry he starts on the 
chase, to become surfeited by his orgy of flesh, 
or to stir up a carnivorous appetite for human 
blood. If he does not die violently in the war- 
fare of these predatory instincts, he is sure to 
sink beneath the waves before his proper day. 



THE BODY 29 

All this we see in a race struggling to leave 
savagery behind. It has been observed of the 
negro that he needs to be taught the value of 
a bushel of corn 2 and the decency of sleeping 
six inches above the ground. The life of de- 
pendence upon the body that he lives makes 
him a serious risk to insurance companies, who 
look doubtfully upon him as a subject for their 
benefits. Thus the body, served too well, turns 
a man over in his gray hairs to poverty and 
disease. 

The thinkers who sat meditatively under the 
Bo trees of India took another way of settling 
the relation of body with soul. They were 
tired of the "shocks of tumult, shrieks of 
crime," and they sought in fleeing from all 
sensation to lose themselves in a "soundless 
waste, a trackless vacancy." Unable to enter 
the active life of the Western ascetic, they fled 
to the interior life. They attenuated the outer 
life to its last thread of interest. A cup of 
water, a bowl of rice, a single garment repre- 
sented the furniture of earth to them, and the 
choir of heaven was only permitted to speak 
in whispers lest it should disturb the dividing 
of the "I" from the "Me," and so obstruct the 



3© STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

attainment of bliss, which was the negation 
alike of pain or joy. 

The body, however, had its revenge. It is 
alike irresistible whether one neglects or con- 
siders it too much. The best thought of India, 
refusing to attend to the proper activities of 
life, left it a prey to fierce and lawless influ- 
ences, which only fell before Western invaders. 
Indian life is a complicated weakness, for the 
net of social custom, meant to ward off intru- 
ders, becomes the entangling web that catches 
the gladiator's own spear, in the crisis of the 
combat. Mind finished the destructive work 
of the body. Getting into the saddle, it rode 
fiercely, until its elaborate distinctions in the 
Sankhya system divide a hair betwixt the north 
and northwest side. Duty has to stand aside 
for discrimination. The self-concentration of 
a monk is the very least step in this process of 
incontinent analytics. 

Ill 

The earliest Greeks gave only the slightest 
attention to man. They were enveloped in the 
"star-fire" and had not reached the "immortal 
tears" of human life. They hazard a few 



THE BODY 31 

guesses as to the origin of man, some of which, 
as in the case of Empedocles, come near to our 
modern ideas of the origin of the species; but 
in general they deal with the elements of 
things, — with air, earth, fire and water. 

In the Socratic period much effective 
thought turns upon the life of man. Socrates 
has a good deal to say about the body among 
other factors of life. And we should expect 
beforehand that men who felt the sense of 
beauty enough to leave in their maimed sculp- 
tures the climax of art, would be interested in 
the body. But alas ! goodness had not yet come 
to live with beauty. The body was not the 
representation of God, so that men sought to 
keep it fair in honor of him; it was rather a 
wonderful machine that answered deftly to 
gymnastics and music. It must never go be- 
yond due bounds, be always rhythmic in action, 
the paragon of works. No one then felt, as 
Schiller did later, that to touch man is to touch 
God. Restraint was advised, because other- 
wise personality would be of less use to the pub- 
lic service, and the state would vanish. This 
view of the body as a machine, later went to 
the extreme of the gladiatorial school in Rome. 



32 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

IV 

The modern mood is not so greatly unlike 
that of Greece if we consider it in the strictly 
scientific aspect. Ascetics and Puritans alike 
are gathered to their fathers. The body is 
studied, and not bruised. Men know it better 
and are less afraid, both of its weakness and its 
lusts, than in some ages of the long struggle to 
find its place. Science has dissected it; phi- 
losophy has doubted it; religion has related it. 

It has been studied structurally and func- 
tionally. We have been told more plainly how 
sin does eat up the tissues and deform the 
frame. We know better what hurts or aids us. 
And the result is that men live longer than of 
old, and they are freer from such consuming 
scourges as were common even two hundred 
years ago. The plague of London is no more 
described as a visitation of God, but as an 
absence of sense. 

V 

When we turn to consider the ancient 
Hebrew conception of the body, set forth in 
the law of the early days, we see the ideal of 
perfection made the goal of endeavor. Moses 



THE BODY 33 

conceives the body very differently from Kap- 
ila. Attenuation, negativity, is the aim of the 
one; of the other, sanity and power. There is 
a distinct advance in the Scriptures over what 
had gone before, or was even contemporary. 
The Levitical law kept a man severely back 
from the rudimentary passions of the savage. 
He is held to a steady attempt to improve the 
breed. Deformity and weakness have in them 
elements of shame; for those so burdened are 
debarred from the ministry of the holiest 
things. Each man is to aim at the highest 
perfection of body, as a prerequisite to the 
highest form of religious service. No less is 
each man to respect the body of his fellow 
enough to keep from spreading disease by 
contagion. 

This aim at perfection of bodily form, which 
also selected the strongest and fairest man for 
king, had two motives. One was the feeling 
that God should be adequately symbolized. 
"Ye shall be holy; for I am holy," means 
among other things that man is to deal fairly 
by his body, for it is the image of God. As 
the heathen devotee would not dare to deface 
the image of his god, so the Hebrew felt the 



34 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

gravity of defacing by lust and appetite the 
living image of his Jehovah. 

The other motive was national. A nation 
that had to wrest its existence and homestead 
from others must be physically strong. The 
encampment and the Levitical law jointly made 
possible the conquest of Canaan. There is not 
the slightest indication in Israel's history of 
the wide-spread idea of the East, that deform- 
ity of the body pleases God. He is, rather, 
pleased with the soundest sacrifices. Blem- 
ished men are in disfavor. Though Jehovah 
permits chastisement and exacts death he dis- 
allows mutilation. 

VI 

There was an appearance of sternness in 
this older code, but iron must be heated to 
make weapons. The sternness all disappeared 
in primitive Christianity. Taught to see the 
sorrow and pain of life by the story of the 
cross, the early Christians were above all com- 
passionate. They remembered the body of 
Christ broken for them. They also knew that 
the body sheltered the Holy Spirit That the 
body should suffer when it was the host of so 



THE BODY 35 

gracious a Guest perhaps gave rise to question ; 
yet sin was abroad, and the wages of sin is 
death. 

If, then, Christ had compassion on a sinful 
world, no less should his servants. It was the 
primal compassion of Christ that supplied the 
wells of the early Church. It was "for Christ's 
sake" that the Church turned compassionately 
to the world, while that world butchered its 
noblest sons, and scorned its choicest spirits. 
Origen could answer Celsus freely, when the 
latter asserted that the Christians were guilty 
of an inconsistency, — first in esteeming the 
body so little that they readily suffered martyr- 
dom, and then, that they esteemed it so much 
that they affirmed its resurrection, — by saying 
that anything was more creditable and worthy 
than to waste the body by vicious courses. 
Hearts newly tender from forgiveness loved 
much in their turn, and the Christians exhibited 
a passion for the suffering unknown before. 
The physical pain of that age must have been 
staggering; for remedies were more than 
heroic, and ignorance was prevalent. It was 
gloriously true, as contemporary writers de- 
scribe them, that the Christians consorted with 



36 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

the downcast and suffering. The quality of 
mercy was not strained. 

VII 

It is what the old homilists call "a melan- 
choly reflection" that men soon lose their 
noblest ideals. They fall from the height of 
their great argument with alarming sudden- 
ness. Hence the early Christian view of the 
body was displaced by a narrower and more 
acrid, though still passionate, conception. The 
medieval ascetic kept part of the Christian 
heritage, for he treated others compassionately ; 
but he printed wounding lashes upon his own 
sides. The confessor would absolve his pen- 
itent, but whip himself, and the eremite would 
treat animals with consideration while he was 
harder than thirty tyrants upon his own flesh. 

The ascetic was a monomaniac, and his rul- 
ing idea was abnegation. The body must be 
kept under, nay, buffeted, as St. Paul said. 
What pains he took to accomplish this ! How 
he scourged himself, starved himself, deformed 
and mutilated himself — all for the glory of 
God — the God who had made the body, 
and whose Son "became flesh, and dwelt 



THE BODY 37 

among us, full of grace and truth" in no ascetic 
mood! Surely asceticism, in the monkish or- 
ders, flinging itself upon a festering life that 
it might heal its diseases and cure its pains, 
and putting upon itself the crown of thorns, 
was a sublime illustration of the paradoxes 
that move, and then enchain, men. 

VIII 

It is early to say just what the modern Chris- 
tian idea of the body will be, for we are too 
near to our own day to see it fairly. 

It is evident, however, that the Church has 
not lost the sense of compassion. Charity deals 
tenderly and wisely with men, since the moving 
idea upon which it works is a growing one, 
and contains at least what has been the motive 
of the best philanthropy of the past. With the 
first disciples, we care for men's bodies because 
we know them to be the temples of the Holy 
Spirit, and we join with Israel in perceiving 
that they symbolize God. The automatism of 
the last century has been lost in symbolism as 
a result of the Romantic movement in thought, 
and our modern symbolism is all the more sug- 



38 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

gestive since we see how really wonderful the 
body is. 

We also have a wider view of the relations 
of the body. We no longer can treat it as a 
thing apart, to be used or abused like an old 
vesture ; on the contrary, we see in it the pivot 
of hereditary forces. We look backwards, and 
seeing it determined by the past we soften pun- 
ishment or judgment; we look forwards, and 
preach responsibility. Men do not sin alone. 
Only the fool believes this in his heart. 

Still, after all is said, the most striking 
departure of the Christian thought to-day is 
in the field of opinion and law. The body, 
known to be subject to temptation, is guarded 
by law as never before. An apostolic Christian 
could fall into vice and no heathen opinion 
would stand in his way. The law, too, would 
be silent; but to-day, faults once permissible, 
and perhaps even a hundred years ago encour- 
aged, are branded by the opinion of men, and 
punished by the law. The Rome of Nero and 
the England of Charles II permitted, nay, 
urged vices that are accounted crimes to-day. 
Christian thought has crystallized into law 
which aids opinion forward. Though, as Eng- 



THE BODY 39 

lish opponents of Local Option affirm, and 
truly, one cannot make men moral by act of 
parliament, the ground of their morality may 
be determined measurably by legislation. 

Hence it begins to appear that for certain 
classes of men the place of the body has been 
pretty well settled. As we no longer know 
Christ after the flesh, and no longer attempt 
to worship God except in the spirit, so the 
temptations of the day, to such as have a 
tincture of modern cultivation, are rather intel- 
lectual than physical. There are still cases 
where the gospel of dirt is accepted; but on 
the whole the sins of to-day are those of 
pride, envy, ambition, — and their consequents, 
cruelty and slander. Thus while we reach a 
more subtle range of temptations we also are 
subject to more damning results for the soul. 
Our problems, to use an analogy suggested by 
Browning, are those of Blougram and not 
those of Caliban. 



THE MIND 



"When, as becomes a man who would prepare 
For such an arduous work, I through myself 
Make rigorous inquisition, the report 
Is often cheering; for I neither seem 
To lack that first great gift, the vital soul, 
Nor general truths, which are themselves a sort 
Of elements and agents, under-powers, 
Subordinate helpers of the living mind: 
Nor am I naked of external things, 
Forms, images, nor numerous other aids 
Of less regard, though won perhaps with toil 
And needful to build up a poet's praise." 

Wordsworth. 



42 



CHAPTER III 

THE MIND 



In some respects, the present age suffers 
from an over-curious desire for more intimate 
knowledge of the mind. It thus becomes "sick- 
lied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and is 
unable to enjoy the careless freedom of earlier 
times, when certain pilgrims wended to Can- 
terbury, and every day was prophetic of sum- 
mer. We are, unfortunately, too conscious of 
our minds and the way they work. Even in 
war there is sprung up a species of subjective 
history utterly unknown before, when Charles 
Lever is superseded by Stephen Crane, and the 
bluff heartiness of earlier days is replaced by 
the recital of the inner experiences of those 
who play the great spectacular game. 

On the whole, however, psychology has done 
most of us good. In any case it was bound to 
come from the moment that Hume awakened 
the cocksure thinkers of the eighteenth century 

43 



44 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

from their "dogmatic slumber" ; and now that 

it has come, thinking men and women, down to 

the country school-teacher, enjoy playing with 

the scientific toy put into their hands. There 

is the kind of startled pleasure in its first using 

that we might imagine a marionette to have, 

as he gravely unscrews his own head and plays 

with it. 

II 

Psychology is here and has come to stay, 
and among the many questions it has brought 
in place of the few it has answered, is the 
extremely interesting one, How does mind 
originate? Does it come fully armed like 
Athena, as the child is quickened into life, or 
does it simply grow, like Topsy, as a result of 
the experience of life? Does it somehow result 
from a deposit of mind atoms contained in 
nature, in a solution, or annexed to all the 
physical atoms that make up our frame; or is 
it merely an illusion ? 

Many answers have been given of which the 
most noteworthy, in general, are the older ones. 
Locke, for instance, with an Englishman's bent 
to psychology, as a result of his study declared 
the mind to be a piece of blank paper, upon 



THE MIND 45 

which experience wrote the events of life, and 
in time, certain reflections working over the 
writing, deciphered what he called the abstract 
ideas. Following Locke, a noble army of 
anthropologists have sought to discover the 
actual filling in of this blank paper in a racial 
way, and they have ventured into "antres vast" 
to bespeak the friendly contributions that even 
savages can give to their science. 

On the other hand, there are those who 
believe that the mind has certain categories, 
which in another form may be called innate 
ideas, and that furnished with these, as the 
hunter with traps, men can go forth into the 
wilds of experience, certain of finding their 
quarry. 

It perhaps needs suggesting before we go 
on, that if nature by its manifold phenomena 
succeeds in writing down upon man's mind cer- 
tain generally received ideas, such as truth, jus- 
tice, virtue, etc., it goes a long way about to do 
its work. On the other hand, it seems incred- 
ible that abstract truths should hang from 
every bough ready to drop into us while asleep, 
or wakefully stumbling, and no such gifts 
should hang in the chambers of the mind 



46 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

itself. More likely is the supposition that the 
mind, though scantily furnished, yet has the 
beginning of abstract truth, which it develops 
in its lifelong wrestle with outer experience. 

Ill 

There has not been any particular contro- 
versy about the main divisions of the mind. 
The older and newer psychology differ in the 
names, but they mean the same thing. The 
mind has for its functions intellection, feeling 
and will. 

Yet one needs to guard against supposing 
that each of these divisions is real instead of 
theoretical, a supposition current years ago, but 
now giving way to a less definite conception, 
so that for the purpose of some, "a stream of 
thought" with "fringe" of greater or less inten- 
sity, is an ample account of the whole matter. 
We may use the descriptive words as a mu- 
sician uses a key. Though the piece is played 
in one key it might be played in another, and 
the result remain about the same for the lis- 
tener. The notes and time and whole content 
of the piece would be there, but the tone would 
be different. 



THE MIND 47 

Intellect is the mind at work discriminating 
and comparing. Whenever we say that things 
are like or unlike, more than or less than, the 
intellectual quality of mind is predominant. 
Sometimes this quality presumes so much that 
men never get beyond merely statistical or 
critical work, and the new creation of imagina- 
tion remains in limbo. As a rule the intellect 
to-day is supreme, and almost every one who 
professes to be a student goes armed with the 
differential calculus, a microscope, a hammer, 
or a set of scales. Some of us, though, do yet 
take heart of grace, believing that the world 
can outlast the aversion or love of the geolo- 
gist, and that antic fancies will play about 
the stars long after those orbs have been 
weighed in the balances and found wanting by 
astronomy. 

Feeling is the more passive side of the mind, 
though it often happens that people of feeling, 
because of their sensitiveness, clearly see intel- 
lectual differences. We must always be care- 
ful not to separate the fields positively. Because 
we have feelings we can rejoice in the pat- 
terned heavens and the dewdrop that answers 
back their glory; and we can weep with those 



4 8 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

that weep, or enter into another's joy, — yea, 
we can receive the word of God, and so 
approach the royal line of prophets, since 
prophecy never dies out in the world of God. 

The will is the citadel of life, but again, the 
will is connected with the intellect, and no less 
with the feelings. One brilliant psychologist 
has told us that the intellectual faculty of atten- 
tion is a large part of the activity of the will ; 
and another that the will is started into motion 
by virtue of an idea of the end to be realized, 
which depends upon the feelings for its imagi- 
native force. The will appears, then, as the 
mind earnestly set upon some end,, feeling 
acutely its wants, invited by a dazzling idea, 
and in order to realize its end, seeking strange 
adventures, till it finds the pearl of great price, 
and then selling all for it. 

Perhaps we can state the factors of the mind 
better in terms of function : the intellect notes, 
the feelings select, the will directs. As a whole 
the mind forms a new order out of the con- 
fused mass of sensations presented to it, or as 
the old thinkers used to say, the little world of 
the mind reflects the great world of nature. 
To some of us the little world, or microcosm, 



THE MIND 49 

is the larger part of the story, for analyzing its 
meaning we discover the Infinite Mind imma- 
nent in all nature. 

IV 

The relation of Christian faith to the mind 
of man has been marvelously close. The apos- 
tles insisted greatly on the "mind of Christ" as 
well as the doctrinal import of his teaching, 
and the disciples are advised to "give a reason" 
for their abundant hope. The conflict of the 
gospel as set forth in the New Testament is 
with those whose minds were essentially irra- 
tional. Jesus had to face blind and unlovely 
prejudice, against which he set over the "sweet 
reasonableness" of his simple teaching. St. 
Paul had to front the exotic zeal of the worse 
than pagan Jews of Asia Minor, and he did it 
in the power of faith supported by a telling 
rationality. His Christian reasonableness in 
Athens should have been a striking lesson to 
Tertullian and his followers. 

In the next age, however, under Tertullian's 
fierce zeal, Christians were commanded every- 
where not to think. They were to flee phi- 
losophy as the quintessential devil. And it was 



50 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

not till after Origen that Christians had a 
great and saintly authority who urged them to 
use their own minds, and to praise God for 
being the object of reason as well as faith. The 
doctrine of irrationality was centuries in dying, 
but, in spite of themselves, its expounders con- 
troverted it. Tertullian, the most frantic of 
these, invaded the stores of pagan wisdom to 
put his enemies to the blush, and while inveigh- 
ing against philosophy, he uses it to discomfit 
his opponents, saying in one place that Scrip- 
ture is too good for such base fellows. 

V 

For years, then, the mind of man was not 
wholly freed, though there were breaks, as 
men like Alcuin and his pupils began to instruct 
Europe in a crabbed learning that grew until 
it blossomed in the Renaissance. For us, free- 
dom came a long time ago. The children of 
to-day are all free born. The Son has made 
us free indeed ; for we can go back to the his- 
torical Christ and see what he counseled and 
what he permitted. The mind of Christ shall 
be ours. 

He taught men, first, a wiser religious dis- 



THE MIND 51 

crimination than they had known before, in 
calling in question the hoary platitudes of the 
pseudo-religious men of his day, who had 
repeated their traditions so often that they had 
lost meaning to them, as our words do if we 
utter them too much. "What about the Sab- 
bath?" he cries; "you urge its inviolability, but 
why?" It was just because Jesus saw why it 
was a gift, that he could infringe its letter if 
there was need. St. Paul, taking up the same 
theme, taught that the law was not a fetter to 
bind men to earth, but a schoolmaster to bring 
men nearer to God. If it failed of its object, 
then, naturally, other ways could be chosen for 
saving men, even to the extremity of the cross. 
Still, Christ was not iconoclastic. That is 
the swift result of a little knowledge and a 
little brains. Young students, and new women, 
alas! clothed with a brief authority, often 
become image-breakers. They insist on a new 
world — that has been travailing in pain for 
ages — being born in a day, and they will have 
no dealings with the stupid Samaritans wha 
prefer dilapidated Sychar before Jerusalem, 
and Gerizim to the virgin Zion. Christ spared 
the worthy past. He knew as few did (the 



52 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

apostles learned it before they preached their 
wonderful historical sermons), that he was 
linked to the past — a Christ without history 
and prophecy would be a shorn and uncomely 
one. Men need the past. The disciple is not 
better than his Lord — so with rare discrim- 
ination he frequented temple and synagogue; 
he commended the widow for contributing to 
its charges, and he sent the lepers to offer the 
usual temple gifts. 

The title of "The Man of Feeling" belongs 
of right to Christ. Henry Mackenzie years 
ago wrote a book with this title that had a 
passing vogue because of its overwrought sen- 
timentality, "no sooner blown but blasted." 
But Christ is no sentimentalist, though he was 
the interpreter of feeling. The feelings are 
often stifled in an intellectual age. Men talk 
ambitiously of not wearing their hearts upon 
their sleeves. They fling down their sover- 
eigns with arrogant munificence and refuse to 
take any silver in exchange. Our Lord taught 
men that tears were not unmanly. Homer 
knew this and made his heroes weep copiously. 
"Jesus wept." He wept for his friends, for his 
city, and he wept tears of blood for his ene- 



THE MIND 53 

mies. This ought to take the stiffening of 
pride from every intellectual upstart. 

Men have no right to quench their feelings, 
and they are wise who express their slightest 
moods of love and liking, instead of keeping 
them sealed up for special moments of dra- 
matic import. Otherwise, like Spanish seamen, 
the fires may be out when they need them. 
Yet feeling is not to be degraded if we follow 
our Lord, either by flooding the unworthy, or 
respecting only a class. We can all feel for 
some people; but Jesus Christ teaches us to feel 
for all. The sun shines upon the tares as well 
as the wheat; the rain descends upon the 
unjust as well as the just. 

As regards the will, Christ's doctrine is cen- 
tral and convincing. The will of God, as the 
only good will, is the principle of spiritual life 
in every good man, — is his meat and drink. 
Augustine affirmed that the world is the mani- 
fest will of God, and his doctrine of grace took 
account of the royalty of will among the 
powers of the mind of man. The will of man 
must become as the will of God, if men are to 
be sons of God. 

When, therefore, we see that the ultimate 



54 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

function of mind is to create a new universe 
out of the old and separate members delivered 
to it by sense, and that this universe is to be 
formed upon the pattern of God's will, we see 
the majesty of mind. It is too noble an artist 
to misspend its years, and the task before it is 
enormous. Men rise to the heights of genius 
when they, too, say, "Thy will be done." If 
they say it sincerely they can say that noble 
word of St. Paul's as well, "I can do all things 
in him that strengtheneth me." Then indeed 
shall Wordsworth's apostrophe to Milton ap- 
ply to them: the world "hath need of thee." 



THE SPIRIT 



"By the Spiritual Self, so far as it belongs to the 
Empirical Me, I mean a man's inner or subjective 
being, his psychic faculties or dispositions, taken con- 
cretely; not the bare principle of personal Unity, or 
'pure' Ego, which remains still to be discussed. These 
psychic dispositions are the most enduring and inti- 
mate part of the self, that which we most verily seem 
to be. We take a purer self-satisfaction when we think 
of our ability to argue and discriminate, of our moral 
sensibility and conscience, of our indomitable will, 
than when we survey any of our other possessions. 
Only when these are altered is a man said to be alien- 
ates a se" 

William James. 



56 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SPIRIT 



It is a sad commentary on man's foolishness 
that ever and anon he labors to destroy his 
delights. There have been cynics in all periods 
ready to revile the noblest virtues, and to pro- 
pose a return to bestiality, asserting that "hap- 
piness is but the perpetual possession of being 
well deceived." Some, including Dean Swift, 
have had the desire for righteousness at the 
back of their irony, but many have had a 
diabolic hatred of man's happiness so far as 
it was founded on faith and not on fact 

Particularly in the schools of atomistic mate- 
rialism, men have been forward to deny the ex- 
istence of spirit in man. The world may have 
a spirit, but the Zeitgeist is universal and not 
particular, it is affirmed. And likewise it is 
asserted that the visions of Paradise so dear to 
the saint are but the hallucinations of fever. 

57 



58 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

What grounds, it is asked, can be adduced that 
lend themselves to the science of mensuration, 
upon which men can honestly erect in broad 
daylight the cloud-capped towers of religious 
faith? 

Questions like these need a preliminary word 
regarding the visions of life. Men talk as 
though visions were to be rejected simply 
because they are visions. It was the unoriginal 
cry of Festus that the visionary, St. Paul, was 
mad, simply because he could not understand 
him. But we have seen that visions affect the 
will according to strict psychology, and the 
will wraps itself in reality, and lo! the vision 
becomes fact. The vision of a Holy Roman 
Empire and an unbroken Church kept back the 
Saracens in the early Middle Ages, and saved 
Europe to the Teutons. Is it not true that the 
most statistical realist nourishes in his heart's 
core a sublime vision of the applause of men 
for his painstaking discovery or keen analysis? 
No, we cannot get along very far on the sim- 
ply materialistic way. It leads to an earth of 
iron — of sputtering steam-engines and re- 
volving shafts, that grind out products but are 
fed with men. 



THE SPIRIT 59 

There are, however, some grounds to be 
alleged as solid foundations for the belief in 
the spirit of man. 

For instance, there has been a generally 
expressed feeling among men, that the actual, 
tangible world, whether of nature, or of man, 
is not the whole of reality. There are sudden 
touches of nature — "a fancy from a flower 
bell, a chorus-ending of Euripides" — that set 
the wings of the spirit beating with force 
enough to affirm its existence, and these have 
been the inklings of men from the beginning. 
There are curious experiences, moreover, of a 
Parnassian belt which the mind often touches 
and almost enters. The intellect is not alto- 
gether contented with its tabulated likes and 
dislikes, measurements and statistics; it seeks 
a bond of unity in nature and in itself. What 
is the designation of that supreme arbiter who 
says to mind after all its dusty work, "Well 
done"? 

Feelings, too, invade a rarer land as they 
seek the ineffable flood that will fill all being. 
Nothing in nature answers them, and one 
infers that a heavenly subject urges their end- 
less search for the city that keeps the Holy 



60 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

Grail. It is the same with the will. Alexander 
does well to weep because there are no more 
worlds to conquer, for he is on the verge of 
seeing, through his tears, the truth that the 
world will not content the spirit of man. 
"Who will undertake to make one shoeblack 
happy ?" And again we infer some final satis- 
faction, and some inner power, both of them 
beyond the intolerable order of mortality. 

The Holy Scriptures reenforce this conclu- 
sion. They deal with man — and this is their 
singular merit — not as a collocation of atoms, 
nor yet as a political force, but as an immortal 
spirit gifted with an experience that is endless 
and roofless. It is the work of profane history 
to describe the life of a man in the long-drawn 
line of his time sequence, and no less to describe 
its breadth, though only of late has history 
undertaken this arduous task. The Scriptures 
describe the life of man de profundis. Says 
Cousin, "Philosophy is not philosophy unless 
it stands on the edge of the abyss, though it 
ceases to be philosophy if it falls in." But the 
Scriptures do descend into hell and even make 
it illustrate human life. " 'Tis in few words, 
but spacious in effect." 



THE SPIRIT 61 

II 

In dealing with the constitution of the 
human spirit, there is the initial difficulty of 
treating the essential and near. We are like 
travelers who have dwelt so long in a foreign 
country that they do not notice its odd man- 
ners, since they have become their own. 
About all we can assert is that "I exist, and I 
think," which was the starting-point both of 
Augustine and Descartes; but if the doubter 
still doubts we cannot do much for him. 

The spirit is essential; and it has been well 
observed that you cannot open a spiritual mys- 
tery with a lancet. Neither can you define it 
by logic. We only touch the rim of any subject 
so long as we remain in the academic attitude. 
A man gets to know that he is a spirit as he 
starts to do the work of a spirit. The whole 
world will assent to his affirmation then. Nay, 
men must have souls, as a long-dead worthy 
suggested, if it is merely to save the expense of 
salt. 

We, therefore, need not be overconfident in 
the historical, or any, definition of the spirit 
of man. Many have tried their wits at the 
problem, but the essential always eludes them. 



62 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

The theory of the origin of the spirit gave rise 
to controversies in the early Church, and the 
theory of its constitution might do so to-day. 

Ill 

There is no need, however, to consider our- 
selves bankrupt of reality because we cannot 
define man's spirit. If any one could tell us 
actually what we are, we should be less than 
we wish to be. God alone knows, and there 
is infinite hope in his discretion. Nor need we 
deem the spiritual life less certain than the 
physical one; for, ultimately, no one has told 
us what that is. Though matter has been the 
subject of philosophic thought for three thou- 
sand years, it has only lately been freed from 
its prison-house of the unknown, — it must be 
confessed that its face is yet ghastly, — as John 
Stuart Mill produces it as "the permanent pos- 
sibility of sensation/' 

In short, we recognize the spirit of man by 
its operations, as we recognize matter by our 
sensations. The spirits of men each 

— "in the sea of life enisled 
With echoing straits between us thrown '* 

answer to us as we question them. We know 



THE SPIRIT 63 

that spirits are abroad because of the mighty 
workings that witness their presence. 

IV 

The deepest classification of these functions 
is that given by St. Paul, in the trinity of abid- 
ing qualities, faith, hope and love. 

Faith is an operation of the spirit of man. 
By faith men believe in, that is, recognize God, 
and by the same means they recognize their 
own spiritual essence. Faith was counted, to 
the antique heroes, a better thing than right- 
eousness; for it was at once more elemental, 
more hazardous, and more fruitful. 

Seeing faith in the world, we seek for its 
divine subject, and this we discover in the 
spirit of man. The rational faculties rebel 
against the risks taken, in all ages, by the faith- 
ful. As Festus remarked, they seem to be 
beside themselves; but though the logical line 
of rationalists have always gibed them for their 
pains and written them down, like Dogberry, 
for asses, somehow they prove to be the "shin- 
ing synod" of the immortals. It is they who 
form our characters, head our histories and 
name our streets. Something within us answers 



64 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

to them ; their faces sharpen ours ; and in their 
company we begin to grow aware of a consti- 
tution within us that seeks the highest wares 
of life. 

The second function of the spirit is that of 
hope. If we reckon solely by intellectual 
standards, the world is not a place that proffers 
much gain. Hence men are most hopeful in 
their untried years, when the smiling face of 
life has not disclosed its Yorick's skull. The 
unthinking man of the unspiritual classes is 
most hopeful, since his nervous organization is 
tough ; but the thinker is apt to grow pessimis- 
tic. Pessimism is not due to lack of goods ; it 
rather grows amid plenty. Scientific hope- 
lessness generally flourishes in an overfull age, 
when life is so luxurious that it becomes a 
"stagnant fen of waters." 

Yet there is hope in the world. In cottage 
and hall there are men who hope, and have no 
care to drive away "the impracticable hours." 
To them each event is the confidence of 
things not seen, — worthier than the present 
order. And as the intellect does not operate 
in hope, surely again we have an evidence of 
the spirit of man in his unsubduable hope. 



THE SPIRIT 65 

The third function is love. There are many 
loves in the world. There is the love of the 
sensual man, which fights for the baubles of 
glances and motions soon to lie quiescent in 
the dust. And there is the Platonic love, — 
the true love of Plato which was centered in 
one of the same sex, — or the modern sub- 
stitute that centers with prudent carefulness in 
one of the opposite sex. The fleshly love 
urges, "Be mine for my sake;" the Platonic 
cries, "I am thine for thy sake." 

Christian love as an operation of the spirit, 
and also a witness to it, is more than these. 
It loves for its own sake, for love is delightful 
and casts a blandishment upon the ruggedest 
nature ; it loves, as well, for the sake of others, 
and gives generously of its fragrant stores. 
Above all it loves for Christ's sake, — for 
God's sake, — for the sake of a renewed earth 
and imported heaven. In the formula of St. 
Paul it cries, "You shall be mine, and I will 
be thine; for both are Christ's." It is love 
generic and specific, for it sees in the single 
man the object of the love of God in Christ. 
No form of human activity short of the spir- 
itual accounts for these quick enthusiasms. 



66 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

V 

The Christian, sure of his spiritual nature, 
does not need these echoes from life to be cer- 
tain of his spiritual existence; though when he 
hears them, he rejoices that the world testifies 
that his house is built on foundations not made 
with hands. As he goes forth he sees how the 
Christian doctrine strengthens each of these 
motions of the spirit. 

Faith is not, for him, blind confidence, the 
bravado of good health and sound digestion, 
or of the after-dinner bottle, but it is the cer- 
tainty of the power of a high personality, 
whose method, at his service, proves to be "the 
way." He is free of the ancient shadow of 
fate, or the modern one of policy, which Napo- 
leon said had taken the other's place; for he 
sees a living Christ at the head of the human 
procession. He believes with the irreligious 
optimist that the procession is going in the 
right general direction; but he knows it is be- 
cause Christ is at its head. Humanity cannot 
become an estray, for its Head has ventured so 
much for it and has proved himself the master 
of those who do, as well as of those who know. 

Hope, likewise, is boundless. We often hear 



THE SPIRIT 67 

the grudging admission that there is a future 
for the world, but that it lies within the reach 
only of the Teutonic race. Very well ! But it 
will be a poor future that only develops one 
race, and that at the expense of the others. In 
the full light of the law of the survival of the 
fittest, I deny this proud assumption. The 
future, like the past, is in the hands of God; 
and the past has shown that, just so far as 
classes or races rudely strive for isolated pre- 
eminence, regardless of the outcasts, the sap 
of life is not in them. The future is for the 
Anglo-Saxon as he takes others thither with 
him, and not as bondservants but as brethren 
beloved. This is the hope of Christianity: it 
despises none, it regards all. 

We have already seen the quality of Chris- 
tian love, and how it differs from the loves of 
earth sung in a "book of verses underneath a 
bough" ; it now remains to indicate its peculiar 
satisfaction. It is love itself; but love carried 
up into infinite terms. It is means and end. 
We love that we may still love and be loved. 
This is true of earthly love so long as it is 
divested of the silken passions, for we could 
not bear to love anything less rare than love 



68 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

itself. But earthly loves end. They end 
because we lack the gift of perseverance, or 
the beloved lacks worthiness. We are weaker 
than our sturdy promises, or our angel turns 
out to be moth-eaten. And then there is death 
to be reckoned with, which, without remorse, 
tears asunder what God hath joined together. 

The loves of the spirit differ from all this. 
We can continue in love because we are urged 
by the "gift of perseverance/' which is really 
founded in the ideal compulsion of the divine 
object. The object of our love never grows 
less, but more worthy, since it is God himself. 
And death is swallowed up in victory. Knowl- 
edge will change in the environment of heaven ; 
for what appertains to earth will be useless, 
and what appertains to God will disappear in 
the wider view given us ; but love that we have 
for God and his world of creatures cannot be 
lost. This is the greatest faculty of the spirit. 

With a world of spiritual operations about 
us who shall say it is spiritless ? 



THE AGE OF WONDER AND TRUST 



" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar: 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" 

Wordsworth. 



CHAPTER V 

THE AGE OF WONDER AND TRUST 



Thus far our study has concerned itself with 
the theater of man's life, and the kinds of 
power he possesses. We now leave the fur- 
nished earth and the heritage of personality, to 
address ourselves to the task of describing the 
different stages of the Pilgrim's progress. 

The thought of life as divided into periods 
has been very common in literature. The 
apostles seized upon the truth in their quick 
apprehension of the development of Scrip- 
ture history as the law vanished in the Gospel. 
St. Peter recommends the addition of virtues 
to the Christian, and the writer of the Hebrews 
gives counsels of perfection. We also find 
Augustine describing life in seven stages, 
beginning with vegetation, and ending with 
the eternal vision of God. Shakespeare's 
scheme is universally known, commencing 
with mewling infancy and ending in "second 
71 



72 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

childishness and mere oblivion." So, too, we 
have Origen's development of spiritual knowl- 
edge, which probably in its turn influenced 
Lessing when he wrote The Education of the 
Human Race; and more recently we have 
Comte's triad of the theological, the metaphys- 
ical and the positive stages in human life. 

In the following pages we shall follow a 
more obvious road than these later divisions; 
and though we shall be far below the soaring 
imagination of the earlier ones, we trust that 
the Spirit will lead us into truth. The first 
stage, then, for us, shall be the age of wonder 
and trust. 

II 

From the earliest historic times men have 
looked back to a remoter past in the faith that 
it was a better age than their own. The Israel- 
ite in Egypt looked to the lost plenty of 
Goshen, and when a captive in Babylon re- 
membered with tear-stained pride the glory of 
David's house. "Before the war," to many 
American citizens means a time of ease and 
comfort untroubled by the tumults of modern 
life. All men look back beyond the flood to 



THE AGE OF WONDER AND TRUST 73 

Eden, when life, for a moment at least, must 
have been ambrosial, full of "golden days fruit- 
ful of golden deeds." 

With the brief exception of Eden, and that 
is indeed doubtful, I do not think these feelings 
are legitimate. Each age has its own weary 
load, its own acrid cares, its own deductions to 
make from the balance of happiness. The fact 
is that men impute to the race what only hap- 
pens to the individual. For the individual 
man, with few exceptions, there is a golden 
age, and that age is in the past. It is the crown 
of childhood that blesses every one of us. 

There are two ways in which the world 
appears golden to us in childhood. It is, first, 
a world of wonder. We do not know its hid- 
den springs of action ; all its sinister processes, 
that we stumble on afterwards, wearying to 
our spirits, remain secret. Men are wise, 
women chaste and noble; all life is beautiful; 
only a few rare terrors affright us. We are 
like those who watch the graceful motions of 
a conjurer, who works eye-starting wonders, 
but we cannot see how the wonders come to 
pass. He turns money into flowers, and flow- 
ers into fishes, with the greatest ease and skill. 



74 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

But later, when he takes us into his confidence, 
we shall find him in a nervous agony, wet with 
perspiration, because of the difficult nicety of 
his feats. 

The world of early life is also a world of 
trust. It more than meets our expectations. 
Men deal more generously with the young than 
the old, for a liar will tell little children the 
truth, and a penurious man is irresistibly 
moved by them to generosity. Men meet chil- 
dren with smiles and depart from them with 
kisses. The distant beauty of that far-away 
time still wraps its ''trailing clouds of glory" 
about us. Christ said that it is the truest rep- 
resentation of heaven, — "of such is the king- 
dom of heaven/' 

III 

This good life has enchanted men so much 
that they have persistently attempted to bring 
it back again. 

One attempt was to conquer it, to take it 
by violence; the method of every ambitious 
man and every world despot. "This world," 
they say, "of refractory elements and turbulent 
motions, shall be conquered. All shall fall into 



THE AGE OF WONDER AND TRUST 75 

order before my 'whiff of grapeshot.' Then, in 
the center of this compelled harmony I will eat, 
drink, take mine ease and be merry." This 
was the temptation of our Lord in the wilder- 
ness. And the temptation was accepted by 
Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon. 

A further attempt has been by skilful com- 
promise and painful balance to develop this lost 
age of gold. "The early passions of men 
have confused and entangled life. Let men 
walk softly and put things in order again. Let 
men give and take. Let there be a balance of 
power in the comity of nations and an equi- 
librium of forces in the commonwealth, and 
then the poorest laborer will sing for joy, for 
work will lose its travail in delight. Sin shall 
not be so much as mentioned in the midst of 
men." Thus speaks politics — the queen of 
compromisers. 

History tells us that compromise fails. The 
world is not on the side of the trimmers. Men 
cannot serve God and mammon. Both in pol- 
itics and religion the future has been with the 
advanced men. Who could feel the joy of the 
early and unsuspecting age while clad in such 
heavy armor as politics offers? Regulated by 



76 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

so many nice distinctions man must go off like 
an alarum in the stress of life. Only to lewd 
fellows of the baser sort, whose golden age is 
tangible and not ideal, can politics procure what 
men crave. 

The latest way to regain El Dorado is by 
social settlement. Once it was thought to be 
in Greece; once seated on the seven hills of 
Rome; once at Paris; once or twice in the flat 
expanse of a German duchy ; Rousseau always 
thought of it "in the country of Vaud" ; aud 
moderns have shifted it from Lebanon to Rug- 
by, and from Rugby to Ruskin. But the New 
Atlantis remains unfound. These are but 
abnormal attempts. In principle and polity 
they are divisive and separative, as they can 
only live by keeping aloof from contemporary 
life. " And a still more excellent way shew I 
unto* you," is the apostolic matin-song. 

IV 

The Christian believes that the supreme way 
is the way of Jesus Christ. And this is to 
refurnish man with a new heart and a new 
activity, and to make him better by an enno- 
bling friendship. Other modes seem to him to 



THE AGE OF WONDER AND TRUST 77 

be like rectifying a jaundiced eye by cunningly 
devised glasses. Cure the jaundice and with- 
out glasses nature assumes her benignant 
aspect. Out of the heart are the issues of life. 

This is Christ's way. If ever men feel that 
the world of wonder is not a dream of baby- 
hood it is when they stand by our Lord. Art, 
though removed from the sordid life of indus- 
try, does not give one this idea; for art is the 
subject of criticism, often is itself polemic; 
nay, has been the ground of downright enmity, 
from Angelo and Cellini to the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood. In studios the theme of conver- 
sation is less of the quality of beauty than of 
the false judgments of criticism. By the side 
of Christ men stand beyond controversy and 
look at life with the eyes of a child, possessing 
it with the zest of incorrigible youth. 

For Christ shows men a new world as he 
gives them new sight. "That we may receive 
our sight" is the unexpressed want of men 
everywhere, who desire to see a new world and 
forget the oppressions of the past. Notice the 
sense of wonder called up by his teaching and 
life. The disciples were often awed, and we 
are told that "the multitudes marveled." No 



78 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

doubt it was the early freshness that Christ 
gave to life that attracted men ; the old routine 
was dreadful, — the transits to Jacob's well to 
draw water; why not have everlasting foun- 
tains? Tracts of life wholly unobserved in the 
past were made living and brilliant in the par- 
ables, and other tracts, as good as unobserved, 
because misinterpreted, took on their precise 
values as he discoursed of them. His hearers 
were as men who had lived on land that stead- 
ily grew poorer, when suddenly vast mineral 
deposits were unearthed and they were rich 
with startling swiftness. This was the result 
of his exhibition of worth and divinity in the 
commonest life. The least of men might be 
sons of God and the soul was beyond price. 

Further, Christ changed men's feelings. 
The untired feelings of youth account for 
much of its glory, and, often, older men renew 
their youth as they see young people enjoying 
experiences that for middle age are become 
stale and unprofitable. The child's first pock- 
ets, the youth's first watch, the beginnings of 
labor, and the rare emotions of love, are 
delightful to the spectators. Taking men who 
belonged to a despondent age overwhelmed 



THE AGE OF WONDER AND TRUST 79 

with the billows of life, or sick of its empty 
feasts, Christ touched their hearts, and we see 
them as the greatest company of youth the 
world ever had. "Paul the aged" is never old. 
These men fairly rioted in life in Jerusalem, 
in Antioch, in Athens and Rome. They had 
put off the old fashions of mortality ; all things 
had become new. 

Finally, Jesus Christ set his disciples to find 
out the wonder and trust of life for themselves. 
When the Seventy went forth he taught them 
trust by sending them unimpeded with prop- 
erty; and they came back marveling that the 
devils were subject to them. And this work 
our Lord ever continues ; for the golden age is 
waiting for us all. It is not here, nor is it 
there; not in gold-fields, or rice-fields, or over 
the pathless fields of the sea; but it is within 
us, imprisoned until the Christ opens our 
hearts. He is the King of glory who casts a 
royal mantle about all his servants. Lift up 
your heads, O ye gates, and the King of glory 
shall come in ! 



THE YEARS OE IMAGINATION 



"Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so 
wise as the second, for there is a youth in thoughts as 
well as in ages. And yet the invention of young men is 
more lively than that of old, and imaginations stream 
into their minds better, and, as it were, more divinely." 

Francis Bacon. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE YEARS OF IMAGINATION 

I 

The years of youth are years of introduc- 
tion; for in them the men and women of the 
future first meet the wide-spread objects of 
human interest. 

They are introduced to knowledge which 
appears to some unfriendly, armed as it is with 
text-books and laboratory instruments. Work 
also becomes an acquaintance as youth learns 
how to use its members, thus growing in grace 
and dexterity. And youth is introduced to the 
relations of life that await it at birth and 
impress it more strongly in the course of years, 
— the relations of home, community, state, 
yes! even the departed pageant of age-long 
history, and the collective bequest of the race. 

Now, these splendid and crowding aspects 
of outer life, like rapidly succeeding pictures 
on a screen, often dull the eye to the inner 
forces of this period, which are in truth greater 
than the outer. And the inner quality of all 
83 



84 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

these years of promise and potency is imag- 
ination. "The light that never was on land or 
sea" belongs to youth. 

II 

The evidence that the years of youth are 
years of imagination is visible in many forms. 
I only call attention to three facts that attest 
its presence. 

The young, first, feed on imaginary nar- 
ratives. The sober story of common events, 
or even the more highly colored work of the 
romantic historian, such as Mr. Froude's, is as 
nothing compared with the works of fiction, 
thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa's grove, that 
fall upon the way of the young. History, it is 
true, is used in a subordinate way as the envel- 
oping action that sets fitly the lyrical heroics 
of several fictitious personages; but always it 
must heighten personality if it is to be allowed 
by youth. So, too, the fiction of polite society 
is not the mere mirror held up to nature; the 
mirror is burnished and throws into artificial 
brightness the impossible acts of an equally 
impossible society. 

Again, imagination dominates youth in the 



THE YEARS OF IMAGINATION 85 

field of ideas. For us in these years the world 
puts on full dress, and it speaks with the 
accents of the sirens. So many a youth has 
left home upon quests that are seen in later 
years to be as mad as the Castilian knight's, 
though at the time of venture they appeared 
as plainly sane as the daily tasks that lay nearer 
home. Imagination weaving myths of an El 
Dorado had much to do with the settling of 
America; and stories of the great Mogul have 
attracted Englishmen to barter twenty years of 
comfort in their native land for twenty years of 
exile in India. 

And, further, the acts of youth are those 
of high imagination. Youth sometimes falls 
from grace, descending to the mean, because it 
lives in crowds and clusters, where the com- 
mon instinct is never as high as that of the 
single members composing the community; 
but for most youths the commonplaces of 
thought are the most striking examples of 
heroism. The thorn-pricked youth of Rome, 
Casabianca, David, are examples of the incite- 
ment and the actual work of youth. Such 
stories, to change slightly a line of Peele's, 
"ravish their beating veins with joy." 



86 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

III 

It is a common error to suppose that there 
is room for the imagination only in the field of 
romantic life. Religion asks its noblest aid, 
for it is the field of ceaseless activity. The 
changes, alarums, pomps, victories and defeats 
of the soul afford ample scope for the work of 
this rare faculty, which fuses the diverse into 
a common whole and brings an ideal order out 
of a real disorder. 

For instance, imagination can best deal with 
the conception of the personality of God. The 
only answer to the question, "Who is God?" is 
furnished by imagination, and not by sight or 
knowledge. Here and there we have intuitions 
of the truth, here and there hints of his love; 
and in places, words of mighty import, power- 
less because of their isolation; but seizing 
these by imagination we bind them into an 
effective meaning for ourselves. 

Even Jesus Christ, who revealed God, is 
delivered to us piecemeal. The four Gospels 
are but four pictures, and the living and acting 
Christ has to be fused out of them by our 
imagination, thus doing away with the defect 
of individuality. It is the same with our 



THE YEARS OF IMAGINATION 87 

Lord's teaching. His doctrines are not pedan- 
tic, neither are they under the form of rubric; 
they are, instead, oracular and sibylline, and 
the imagination of man has to link them 
together and interpret them. It is a cause of 
thankfulness that we have to put our knowl- 
edge of God together in this way ; for we even 
love him the more, as we love any knowledge 
that has called forth our best endeavors. We 
appreciate most highly the ideas that we have 
worked for and not those that we call innate, 
and in like manner we rejoice in our idea 
of God, which, if effective, is the result of 
immense labor. 

By the aid of imagination men are also able 
to work out the possibility of future piety. 
The imaginative youth draws up the plan of 
the noble edifice he intends to inhabit in the 
future, but he does not neglect the inhabitant. 
He, too, must be worthy of his high vocation, 
ennobled by nurture into the worth of his sur- 
roundings. Born into a world as full of noble 
histories as ours, any thoughtful youth is apt 
to consider his own future life as a continued 
experiment in goodness, wherein he seeks new 
ways of living the true and the beautiful, 



88 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

and to do this he will be dependent upon 
imagination. 

Thus Christ trained his apostles. Not only 
were they refused the usual furnishings of 
travel; they were, no less, thrown back upon 
themselves in regard to the actual application 
of their message. There was no detailed plan 
of campaign drawn up for them, and they 
were not fettered by formulas. The incidental 
might easily grow into the important. "What 
an imagination God has !" cried Tennyson, and 
the same speech falls from us as we read the 
archives of the heart opened to us by the Apos- 
tles Paul and John. 

These imaginative years, moreover, tell in 
the gradual emancipation of man. For youth 
is as "thorough" as Strafford in its theories of 
the social order. The puttering economist 
tries to do a little here and there in the way of 
improving the conditions of the life of the 
masses, preaching a gospel of meliorism; but 
youth, thoroughly fearless, seeks the ultimate 
of salvation. And the caution of the one is 
matched with the free activity of the other, 
with happiest results for humanity. While the 
older men stand upon the bank of the stream 



THE YEARS OF IMAGINATION 89 

and measure its depth and register its chill, 
young Leander swims the Hellespont, thus 
proving that it is not absolutely hopeless to 
attempt to bridge it. 

IV 

With a relationship like this, why is it that 
Religion and youth so often go on separate 
ways? People talk to-day of the "paganism" 
of the young ! 

One reason, hinted before, is the feeling in 
youth of the presence of the crowd. The years 
of imagination are passed more socially than 
any years in life. There is no time more sub- 
ject to the slavery of opinion than this, as 
imagination adds a power to opinion that it 
really does not possess. Young persons often 
give way to the ignoble, because the lowest ele- 
ments in their clannish society are pronounced 
in leadership, and they mutely accept a ser- 
vitude like Israel's in Egypt, and have to spend 
long years thereafter recovering their own 
proper judgment. Only, however, as youth 
dares to stand alone is it made of the stuff of 
heroes and not of the stuff of dreams. So 
youth, often, afraid of avowing discipleship 



90 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

with Jesus Christ, remains in a state of pupil- 
age to the very meanest of its fellows. This is 
slavery indeed. 

The second reason for the irreligiousness of 
youth is an idea. It misinterprets religion as a 
robber of the juice and sap of life. In reality, 
just so far as the search of youth is for the fair- 
est and best — the imaginary world not yet 
built but always a-building — it runs upon the 
very ground of the religious life. Sturdily 
seeking the truth, and living with Jesus Christ, 
this fair world comes measurably to pass ; evil 
imaginations are lost in oblivion and visions 
tend to become accomplished facts. Is it not 
true that the highest act of imagination is the 
life of our Lord? Literature, art and music 
never come up with it. Human imagination 
droops before the impossible task of represent- 
ing it. 

And yet imagination, — the imagination of 
youth, — will never rest till it centers upon its 
own highest character. The fair world of the 
hours of reverie cries out for a marrowy life 
within it. The home that imagination con- 
structs requires a great soul to live in it to 
make it significant. With many, dreams have 



THE YEARS OF IMAGINATION gi 

melted away, the light of the stars has vanished 
in threads, and frosty reality has blackened 
imagination. It is because the soul which drew 
this world heroically was forespent in its 
dreaming and had no strength left for the 
sacrifice that alone could attain it. Imagina- 
tion must ever be refreshed and renewed by 
great examples. Parables give place to wider 
parables, and all at last to life itself. So 
imagination must consort with reality. When 
youth has been with God, and learned of 
Christ, then the sequel has had greater and 
greater spiritual issues and returns; for on the 
descent from Transfiguration the soul can 
allay the hot miseries of actual life. 



THE STORM AND STRESS PERIOD 



"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men 

Gang aft agley, 
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain 
For promis'd joy!" 

Burns. 

"Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all; 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; 
And enterprises of great pith and moment, 
With this regard, their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action." 

Shakespeare. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE STORM AND STRESS PERIOD 
I 

It is a noteworthy fact that our Lord was led 
into the wilderness to be tempted before he 
entered upon his active ministry. After years 
of seclusion he steps out at once upon the 
boards as a great protagonist. And the 
importance of the fact is due to its representa- 
tive character ; for it was not an isolated expe- 
rience in life, but typical of what men suffer in 
"widest commonalty spread." Because Jesus 
was the Son of man he also suffered with him. 

Almost every one has an experience of the 
same kind in the ruddy years of youth; but 
it was not till the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury that the experience was named. It was 
in Germany that it was first called the "storm 
and stress period/' where it stood for a feeling 
of storm and beleaguerment, the peculiar prop- 
erty of an extreme wing of what has since 
been called the Romantic school. 
95 



g6 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

"Storm and stress" became a literary catch- 
word, and no less a literary motive, which 
blossomed in Germany in Schiller's Robbers, 
and in England was a part of Byron's literary 
capital, which ultimately was invested in Cain 
and Manfred. There is a Titanic expression 
in these productions, of the fierce passions and 
zeal of youth. Fortunately Schiller outgrew 
his soul-pains, but Byron did not; and later 
men have regretted that he beat the air so inef- 
fectively with his keen blade, when he might 
have helped to free men from their mortal 
terrors. 

II 

We must stop a moment to ask ourselves: 
Why is youth the time of storm and stress? 
One would think the median years of life 
would suffer more. 

One answer is that the ideality of youth 
expects too much from life. With the dreams 
of childhood yet in mind, young people look 
for a better heaven and earth than human phi- 
losophy approves. The thoughtful youth comes 
to a place where he is staggered by the rioting 
mediocrity of life, as he sees men satisfied with 
a poor second-best when they ought to be pas- 



THE STORM AND STRESS PERIOD 97 

sionately striving for perfection. When this 
generous idealism touches the materialism of 
life, it is not surprising that it shudders. The 
highly strung lyre must flatten its tone in such 
an atmosphere. Jesus Christ, stung by the 
insolence of reality, called some of his contem- 
poraries vipers. For countless generations 
young men have taken "arms against a sea of 
troubles." 

Secondly, the fine audacity of youth in the 
espousal of ideas, and the attempt to carry 
them out, leads to this weltering experience. 
The work often undertaken is too great, the 
burden greater than can be borne. Think of 
Rousseau as a youth acting as interpreter to 
the archimandrite of Jerusalem and making a 
speech before the Senate of Berne, when he 
confessed himself unable in later life to address 
two or three people who came to thank him for 
a gift of books sent to a town library ! Youth 
can composedly push forward the idea of jus- 
tice to partiality, and be zealous pleaders to a 
case when they should be unmoved judges. 

A most amusing instance of this zeal of 
audacity that brings a man into trouble is 
recorded of Fichte by Goethe. The youthful 



98 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

philosopher was as careless as a boy about the 
preservation of the existing order, and as a 
result of his theories "a knot of students at 
last gathered in front of his house and smashed 
his windows — a most disagreeable way of 
convincing him of the existence of a Not-L" 
Thus the zeal of youth runs up against the 
inertia of life and comes to grief in the conflict. 
A third cause of these storms is the prentice 
hand of youth. There are troubles that origi- 
nate in lack of experience or lack of knowledge. 
In the strongest currents one may go down 
stream with ease ; but to swim only a little way 
against the flood fills eyes and mouth with 
water. Youth nobly tries to do much, but 
ignobly tries to do it before it is practised. 
Hence ensues distress. Here Christ becomes 
our example, as in many other ways; for he 
waited until he had learned his profession, 
and then struck no false note, secure in power, 
unbrokenly successful. 

Ill 

We turn to consider what the storms and 
stresses of youth are. 

First in order stands the storm of thought. 



THE STORM AND STRESS PERIOD 99 

Emerson once calling attention to the sordid- 
ness of his time affirmed that "a rush of ideas 
is the only conceivable prosperity that can come 
to us." But to the young man there are some 
disadvantages attending this flood. The "rush 
of ideas" comes so often in the form of an 
Atlantic storm, when we simply prayed for a 
Nile overflow. They are as waves of the ocean 
— angry, snarling, controversial, unpersuasive. 
"What is truth?" is the cry. And the chaotic 
heap of facts and fancies gives us no inkling of 
an answer. The Bible even seems to us con- 
fusing with its many unedited documents, and 
its vast stretch of history. We are stunned by 
its emphasis and in doubt of its silence. What 
am I to do, say, or believe ? Here is one storm. 
Second in order stands the stress of will. 
If Schopenhauer's "world of will" exists it 
must be sought in youth. Older people learn 
to say "if possible" or "if it please God" ; youth 
starts out frankly for itself. But it finds that 
will is not uniformly successful. It tugs and 
strains long years without recognition; it 
grows dejected; it breaks upon the rocks. Will 
sets out with flying colors but it often comes 
ashore with rent sails and tangled rigging. 

:LofC. 



ioo STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

The third storm is in the feelings ; for youth 
does not sift its passions nor try its spirits. 
The bad sometimes enchains its volitions, as it 
speaks hotly, lives intemperately, and hopes as 
those who are called fools. Governed by feel- 
ings, distinctions are obliterated, and almost 
unknowingly it breaks through Paradise into 
a sin-cursed world. A slender thread holds the 
great vessel in place, but once loosed who shall 
say what its fortunes will be? This is the 
great flagrancy of life, that after long guard- 
ianship and election, the soul, disregarding 
"ancestral voices prophesying war," yet flings 
itself into an ocean of tumult where many voy- 
agers have been lost. 

IV 

What, then, should youth do? Jesus Christ 
answers as a young man, "Come unto me . . . 
learn of me!" 

Now this cry of our Lord is born of real 
experience. He had the "storm and stress 
period" as we have it; for did he not face a 
cruelly materialistic world, that could not con- 
ceive even of heaven apart from carnal love; 
and did he not beat up against the stony hearts 



THE STORM AND STRESS PERIOD 101 

of men ? Though shown many ways of speed- 
ing to his end with no trouble and much glory, 
he refused, and in the wilderness felt the 
depression of doubtfulness. His words surely 
must be valid. 

He comes to youth and helps its thought. 
He cries, "I know you are in a confused and 
wayward world. It is ragged and uncomely; 
but learn my lesson of humility and things 
immediately grow orderly and tolerable/' For 
history asserts that the meek and lowly find the 
way when others fail. They discover hidden 
paths and feed on neglected joy. With his 
power of world-comprehension, he emptied 
himself of his glory and lived the narrow life 
of a Nazarene, thus making, as the author of 
the Hebrews says, his humiliation his glory. 
The death of the cross was his crown. 

This great Teacher aids our wills. The will 
of man is not so much weak as misdirected. 
Bad men have plenty of will, but they use it in 
wrong ways, setting it upon base ends. Men 
set their wills upon the unobtainable, and it 
takes long to learn that what is beyond our 
power is not good for us. If it were good for 
us we should have it; for God does not with- 



102 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

hold good things from his children. So our 
Lord rectifies the variation of our wills and 
turns them to the will of God, which ever wins 
its place in the world. If our will is his, we 
also stand in the vantage of victory. 

And at last, by the gift of a new heart, our 
Lord purifies our feelings. They become select 
and orderly — steady in affection. One of the 
pressing desires of youth is for novelty. The 
"storm and stress" men of Germany knew this 
and departed on wild quests to gain easement. 
But Jesus Christ gives to men this imperish- 
able gift; for he teaches men continuously so 
that they come back to the old order with a 
new meaning. The child wearies of his toys 
and huddles them away; but in a few days he 
seeks them eagerly again and plays with them 
for hours because he has altered in the mean- 
time, having learned more of the world; and, 
clothing the old toy with the new knowledge, 
he gets in fact a new plaything. In like man- 
ner, in the intervals of our sterner play, the 
growing revelation of knowledge in Christ 
wraps about the old and unmeaning a deep sig- 
nificance newly imported from the kingdom of 
God. 



THE STORM AND STRESS PERIOD 103 

Storms may come, and so may stresses, — 
"soul-transporting fear" if it likes, — to the 
man of Christian faith. For it is neither a 
myth nor a single fact in recorded time that 
Christ walks the waves of Galilee. It is rather 
a continuous and fundamental truth in life. 



THE DAYS OF WORK AND WINE 



"But then we must look for prosperity not in pal- 
aces or courts of princes, not in the tents of conquerors, 
or in the gaieties of fortunate and prevailing sinners; 
but something rather in the cottages of honest, inno- 
cent, and contented persons, whose mind is no bigger 
than their fortune, nor their virtue less than their 
security." 

Jeremy Taylor. 



106 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE DAYS OF WORK AND WINE 
I 

As a man reaches the watersheds of life, — 
thirty-five or thereabouts, — he has a feeling 
of intoxication. Inebriated with life, his soul 
is filled with the wine of his passions and its 
forces. 

The practical man, among others, is filled 
with a sense of power as he views the world 
as a fine instrument from which many tunes 
may be forced. Or, perhaps, he thinks of it as 
an immense playground for his energies, upon 
which he still delights to walk in the intervals 
of the game. He rejoices still more when the 
game is on; for he is glad to do his day's 
work, so full of startling changes and unex- 
pected fruit. The world is a Gog and Magog 
world of immense proportions, overrunning 
with manifoldness, and so powerful that even 
an undersized man grows something of a hero 
as he squarely faces it. 
107 



io8 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

Mountains await his coming that they may 
be scaled in half-earnest play; seas invite the 
daring sailor; and dark regions drawn upon 
the maps like nebulous clouds cry aloud for his 
acquaintance. What cannot a man do when 
smitten with this intoxication of power ! 

Life is intoxicating, too, for the man who no 
longer stands in the pit, but watches its riot 
from the gallery. The reflective man sees 
spacious vistas that invite his steps. The 
"dusty yesterdays" await his resurrection as he 
deciphers their monuments; and the play and 
tussle of the present, with its balanced opposi- 
tions like "spent swimmers that do cling 
together and choke their art," is always fasci- 
nating; while the dawn just ahead fills him with 
a priestly dignity, as of one who alone among 
men can spell out its auguries. It is not sur- 
prising that reflective men have been so exalted 
with their thoughts that they have fallen into 
wells while looking at the stars. 

Still more strangely, men who are neither 
active nor reflective fall under the spell of life 
in these middle years. Neither businesslike 
nor philosophical, a man may yet become 
intoxicated because the wine of life is mixed. 



THE DAYS OF WORK AND WINE 109 

The mixed wines are notably heady. Thou- 
sands of men, fribbles in thought and incom- 
petent in action, yet think themselves great, 
much as a drunken man thinks himself a king. 
Simon Magus survives in all ages in the per- 
sons of those who give themselves out for some 
great one, and yet are ignorant of the first 
principles of life. So the drunken tinker, 
Christopher Sly, cries out, " Upon my life, I 
am a lord, indeed ! " 

II 

This intoxication, in a measure, is a divine 
gift to men. The sense of supremacy over for- 
tune is necessary to men if they are to be any- 
thing else than pitiful beggars; but the true 
sense of supremacy never goes beyond exalta- 
tion, which heightens men's powers and never 
weakens or confuses them. If men are weak- 
ened, the exaltation is not of heaven. A house 
divided against itself cannot stand. So every 
son of God has meat to eat that the world does 
not know, that gives him courage in the 
peccant world, and, aiding his work, makes 
him rejoice. 

Besides aiding men, this exaltation rewards 
men. It is frequently all that a man gets for 



no STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

his work, and it is enough. We call it by many 
names — "the sense of having done our duty," 
"the artistic joy/' "the peace of God" — but 
in reality it is the penny that we all get in the 
evening after we have done our work well. 
Day after day we may struggle and sweat, and 
men be none the wiser of our pains, and 
indeed to us the result may be as nothing, yet 
God accepts us, and we know it when we speak 
with him. Some day, we believe others shall 
know also, as he takes up the work of the past 
and says in the great congregation, "Ye did it 
unto me." 

Ill 

But men do go beyond this pure joy into 
the impurity of intoxication. Men get drunken 
with life. And the peculiar evil of drunkenness 
is that it forgets yesterday and to-morrow, and 
allows to-day to outshine the whole calendar, 
again bringing into human life the savage 
mood that men have been so long trying to 
throw out. 

Thus we find men so highly strung that they 
deny the coming of any to-morrow. Scientifi- 
cally they refuse to consider anything out of 
the present order. Philosophically they are 



THE DAYS OF WORK AND WINE in 

indifferent to anything beyond the limits of 
academic thought. Practically they cry, "Let 
us eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we 
die!" The day of the present is enough for 
them, since they have heightened it with their 
own draughts. They are kings, and priests, 
and presidents, instead of being sinners, and 
potential sons of God. 

To others there remains a future, but it is 
base, for it is shot through and through with 
selfishness. They say they are working for 
their children ; or they profess to forward the 
gift of civilization to barbarian races; but the 
gift generally has a string tied to it that pulls 
back gold into the giver's coffer. It, unlike the 
quality of mercy, is strained. 

What is civility, what are civil conveniences 
and tastes? The idea is always changing, and 
even while we are defining it, it turns out some- 
thing else. Persia, once in the van of the 
world, is but an echo of the past, and its deserts 
no longer are blessed with fringing palms, and 
its royal tombs are despoiled. The riches of 
the race take to themselves wings and fly away. 
Indeed, are not these riches mainly conven- 
tional ? The shah answers for us as he collects 



ii2 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

articles of worth in ivory and bone, and then 
puts a lot of sixpenny tooth-brushes along 
with ivory carved with eight years' labor. 
And if we demand a western and modern in- 
stance, Walpole suffices, who put Wolsey's hat 
by the side of an old master's picture and 
doted on King William's spurs. 

Some of the intoxicated ones narrow their 
world so as to win it easier. They refuse to 
work for others because they have so much to 
do for themselves. This is being drunken with 
dregs. Judas was one of those who for the 
sake of spite, or avarice, willingly sold his 
Lord. The class is numerous and contains 
those who have sold their country, religion, and 
their own souls for a mess of pottage. They 
give way to an imperious call of life and lose 
forever, repeating in all ages the fall of Adam, 
their father. 

IV 

What, then, may men legitimately work at ? 
The exalted years of middle life ought to bring 
forth golden deeds. This, all of us feel. We 
cannot bear to think of them being but sound 
and fury. 

Our Saviour when reproached for his exal- 



THE DAYS OF WORK AND WINE 113 

tation, and the mysterious words and deeds that 
grew out of it, answered, "We must work the 
works of him that sent me." The true worker 
will never seek to do less than this. His work 
will not be the mere forwarding of social 
desires, for they are always confused, always 
exaggerated, and often wrong; and still less 
will it be the pushing of his own little ends. 
He will seek to be less of a pettifogger and 
more of a statesman. The work of man is the 
work of God. 

Now this work of God has been partially 
revealed to men — as fully revealed as their 
finiteness is able to bear — in Jesus Christ, with 
the divine provision that as a man does what 
he knows of it, he shall ever see more. 

And this work is first that of creation. Jesus 
therefore comes as the one who re-creates men, 
and his disciples are made partakers of his 
heavenly calling. Of course, as Bacon long 
ago pointed out, man makes nothing, — all 
that he can do is to put side by side what 
already is made, and nature completes the 
transformation; but for practical purposes we 
call this activity 'making.' This kind of work 
is possible to men in the field of the spirit ; for 



ii4 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

we can put about men the noblest creations of 
God in thought, love and deed. We really are 
"God's fellow workers" when we surround 
men with what will make them better. So 
Jesus sent his disciples to preach the gospel 
and thus bring about the new creation that all 
nature had travailed for so long. 

A second thing God does, second in the 
order of nature, last in the order of thought, 
is to think. God is truth, and truth is the high- 
est form of thought, as Origen felt when he 
suggested that contemplation was the highest 
exercise of heaven. God is ever thinking or 
else he could not be working, and he is always 
thinking truth. This is our second labor. The 
days of work should be days of truth. This 
we need to remember when men cry that "You 
can't be true and honest and succeed, — this is 
the age of shams!" How the older workers 
shame such answers as this ! Hear one speak : 
"I, Ludovicus Bloc, bound this book honestly 
to the praise of Christ." 

At least, if one cannot do the truth in a con- 
structive way, he can do it negatively by expos- 
ing the false and meretricious; for knowing 
that certain things are not true, and saying so, 



THE DAYS OF WORK AND WINE 115 

clears the way for the "thing as it is." But a 
man shall know the truth as he works with 
God. It is the securest way of finding it. 

And last of all, God loves. This is the final 
truth we uncover, and yet it is the primal act 
of God. If there is anything before or after 
in God, love surely must be first; for his very 
essence demands the eternal Son as the object 
of his eternal love. 

Now love is hard work for man — the hard- 
est work. If we read a novel we perceive the 
hero is in a cold sweat most of the time; and 
when it comes to loving enemies, who is suf- 
ficient unto this thing? And love has two 
stages: it heals men, and it feeds men. The 
former aspect is the most frequent, but the lat- 
ter is most needed. In the high flush of power 
men can love enough to heal; though power 
goes out from them they can bear the loss ; but 
to feed men is a severer task. Christ fed more 
than he healed in his life so far as numerical 
records show, and doubtless it was the harder 
task. But though with us it also is harder, it 
can be done, for the weakest is made stronger 
as he uses his strength. Hence the true disciple 
has given himself for his fellows, and life has 



n6 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

been taken up again, like the miraculous bas- 
kets, with more in it than it held at first. 

"Feed my sheep !" was Christ's word to his 
most active disciple. And this is an admoni- 
tion that becomes an imperative. Men work 
primarily for their own bread. But Christ 
pushed the other half of life forward, and men 
are called now to feed others. Organized 
industry would still its recriminations if this 
burning thought possessed it. And literature 
and art would seek, by what Dr. John Brown 
calls "fine confused feeding/' to strengthen 
men's hearts for their needs. Religion at- 
tempts this, and the worker who is also wise 
will make the same attempt. The worker is 
expressly the bishop of all stunted, starved 
natures. They will be required at his hands. 



THE TIME OP REFLECTION 



"Our little systems have their day; 

They have their day and cease to be: 
They are but broken lights of thee, 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

"We have but faith: we cannot know; 
For knowledge is of things we see; 
And yet we trust it comes from thee, 
A beam in darkness: let it grow." 

Tennyson. 



118 



CHAPTER IX 

THE TIME OF REFLECTION 
I 

In one of his tenderest and most familiar 
letters St. Paul urges the Philippians to reflect 
upon life. And in doing this he illuminates 
for a moment a neglected facet of Christianity, 
which is a reflective as well as an active faith. 
So he tells them that the surest way of smiting 
the errors of pagan mythology is to think on 
the lovely and well-reported things brought to 
light in Jesus Christ. In the same mood he 
advises the Galatians to prove their work. 

In the course of the apostle's life two 
grounds of reflection become obvious, and, in 
fact, insistent. One is the change in life. No 
one in the Gospel history was subject to vicis- 
situde more than St. Paul. He is a standing 
example of the extremes of experience; for he 
did not stand in a "calm and shallow station/* 
but tasted fulness or was tortured by want, 
and these rapidly changing events played off 
one on the other, leaving solid lessons behind. 
"9 



120 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

St. Paul does not stand alone in this. Ger- 
man philosophy was born in the pangs of 
national unity, and Fichte died nursing the 
wounded soldiers who had fought for the 
Fatherland, giving the lie to those who assert 
that philosophy dreads change. Indeed, the 
subject of change had been one of the earliest 
to engage the skill of the Greeks, who played 
with the thought of the resolution of the One 
into the Many, and the Many back again into 
the One. The East, moreover, had felt the 
same enchantment. Job reflects on change as 
a descending series even down to the abyss; 
and David walks back again out of the pit 
to the marching chorus of God's wonderful 
works to the children of men. 

The other ground of reflection is work. St. 
Paul's "labors more abundant" surely fur- 
nished him with ample data here. Work does 
make man reflect ; for it is change, — purpos- 
ive and conscious change, — and altering the 
statu quo gives rise to questions of better or 
worse, and moral judgment follows upon its 
heels. Work does not drive away reflection, 
but is an antecedent of it. Pleasure kills 
thought quicker than anything. 



THE TIME OF REFLECTION 121 

We therefore see how naturally the years of 
reflection follow the years of work and wine. 
In the process of plowing the fallow soil, 
flowers of thought turn up. And often, to 
change the figure, men are like sea fishermen 
who find pearls as well as fish, and then sell 
their pearls, needing no longer to pursue the 
hazardous work of the past. God be thanked 
for work! God be thanked yet more for 
thought, without which life would signify 
nothing, and only be a consistent panic of 
ever-defeated millions. 



II 



Though reflection does not become a habit 
without severe training, once get the habit 
formed and it is a marvelous ally. Nothing is 
an outcast to the reflecting mind. The most 
diverse and separated facts can be brought to 
bear upon life. When a man begins to reflect 
on any subject he is like those who pay bills 
indifferently with paper, gold or silver, — 
everything liquidates the debt. And as for the 
subjects of thought, St. Paul's list takes away 
one's breath. There are, however, several 



122 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

great divisions of thought that show them- 
selves as a man begins to reflect, and though 
the scheme we follow differs from that of 
technical philosophy as the speech of trade dif- 
fers from the school of economics, it has pre- 
cisely the same things in view. 

In the time of reflection a man begins to 
speculate about himself. Forty years, perhaps, 
measure his indifference to himself, except as 
to his powers of work, but all at once a childish 
memory, or an accent of his early contempo- 
raries, — a face — a faded letter — goes to his 
heart like an arrow shot by a king. And then 
he feels his being slowly uncovered and pal- 
pitating before him. It is as if he had been 
unknowingly playing with a loaded gun, as a 
child might, which goes off suddenly and 
throws him into alternate fever and chill. 
What a wonder he is alive now! that he had 
not come to grief a hundred times ! In short, 
how mysterious life is! 

Yes! and how mysterious is other life, too. 
Here he has been brutally elbowing his way 
forward, trusting to native stupidity and hard- 
ness to carry him through, and now he sees 
other palpitating mysteries about him, — "dis- 



THE TIME OF REFLECTION 123 

tinct universes walking about under each hat" 
Perhaps he won his point in the battle, but at 
what a sacrifice ! He has trampled over flower- 
gardens to build his ugly wall one brick higher ; 
or he has burned a city to avenge a word, — 
where dwelt men, and women, and little chil- 
dren like unto the cherubim. Or, perhaps, he 
has lived familiarly with Jesus as the Carpen- 
ter's Son, unwitting of the ocean depths of 
spiritual force that abide in the Master's heart. 
When he does awaken he is dazed and asks 
with Nicodemus, "How can these things be?" 

A further development of reflection con- 
cerns morals. After work, a man of sound 
conscience asks, Was it worthy and was it done 
well? Or, what is the best thing to work at, 
and how may one attain it? This was a deep 
question of early thought, and to-day it appears 
to be reviving in its force. 

It was no slipshod generalization that made 
Lactantius insist that the greatest good is 
immortality. Carried to a wise application, 
this is a profound truth, not so much because 
all other goods are wrapped up in immortality, 
but rather because it signifies the imperishable. 
The object of work, then, is discovered as the 



124 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

building up of the permanent, and the truest 
moralist is he who works for eternity, and not 
he who tithes, or divides his cummin-seeds, as 
Bacon happily expresses it; nor yet the one 
who revels in nice distinctions or unimpeach- 
able casuistry. For, it may happen that the 
moralist has to don the girdle of the reformer, 
and sometimes use it for a whip. 

The mode of work also must needs partake 
of immortality. There are many who are 
deeply concerned about this, for they suppose 
that obstinacy is consistency, neglecting the 
doings of nature, who clothes her imperish- 
able substance in many rich and changing 
forms, and exhibits truth in myriad ways. 

"Love your neighbor/' said Christ, and some 
have honestly tried to do what they were told, 
but how diverse the method! In one age it 
was pleading for justice as equity, — thus the 
Apologists construed it; in the feudal age it 
was giving a man a chance to defend himself; 
later it was to educate him, and now it is to 
feed and house him and to furnish him with 
ideals. So the end has interpreted the means. 
And the moral man proves to be the immortal 
man, changing his tools and his methods, but 



THE TIME OF REFLECTION 125 

persistent in his heart's desire that Israel 
might be saved. 

A third phase of reflection concerns itself 
with hope. You see how organic all reflection 
is: if work be done, what is to be its result? 
What may we hope for? 

Thus men turn to a future life and a better 
one. It may be merely in the construction of 
noble earthly estates — for thinkers have all 
set their wits at making a perfect state, from 
Plato to Mr. Mallock — or it may be in deep- 
ening the religious hopes of men, and purifying 
the wells of life. 

Religion and what it offers is the chosen 
field of this part of the reflective life. Get 
several well-read and well-instructed people 
together and they naturally fall to discussing 
the future. Shallow Mr. Pepys in the year 
1600 stops the headlong course of his pursuit 
of merriment to talk and reflect on this great 
theme; and Prince Bismarck, in the midst of 
his state cares, often recurred to this topic and 
spoke plainly of the futility of statesmanship, 
or the smiles of a king, beside the unspeakable 
compulsion of the thought of God. 



126 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

III 

The further men proceed into this abstract 
air, the clearer is the fact to them that the 
results of reflection must be embodied in per- 
sonality. Abstract statements are never warm 
and kindly to men. So the pupils of the 
schools in Greece early began to embody their 
results in the ipse dixit of their masters, lean- 
ing heavily upon personal authority. For 
Christians, Jesus is the sum of the whole mat- 
ter. Truths, stern, unyielding, necessarily 
craggy in their expression, came from him 
"full of grace," and men were willing to be 
smitten by one who could do it so well; for 
men love anything when it is done by a genius, 
and can applaud deserved punishment if it is 
only well delivered. 

Reflection guided by our Lord affords us 
truth and safety. His words stand out bravely 
dressed in eternal authority; for he has sub- 
scribed to the terms of reflection, the ampler 
part of their worthiest words, giving men the 
last and unanalyzable words of thought. The 
whole of life is illuminated by the great gospel 
monosyllables, that stand out so often and con- 
trast strikingly with the vocables of his time. 



THE TIME OF REFLECTION .127 

As the end of earthly reflection is to lose 
fear and gain power, so the end of spiritual 
thought is to lose the fear of sin and to gain 
the power of holiness. Reflection guided by 
Jesus Christ will be neither abstract nor bril- 
liant with the glare of hell, as some modern 
thought is, but it will find its goal, and that 
goal is the mind of God. There will be in 
reflection thus guided and aimed a quality of 
divine play, as the mind goes through the 
world, finding here and there an article of truth 
for its life and work. It will see common 
things in strange connections that give a star- 
tled pleasure. It will discover also in the old 
some quality of unfading newness. To reflect 
upon the life of God is to awake to walk in 
newness of life. 



THE FIELD OF MEMORY 



Childhood's loved group revisits every scene; 
The tangled wood-walk and the tufted green! 
Indulgent Memory wakes, and lo, they live! 
Clothed with far softer hues than Light can give." 

Rogers. 



i& 



CHAPTER X 

THE FIELD OF MEMORY 

I 

Human life is curiously inevitable. Men 
may pick and choose what particular acts go 
into a certain stretch of time, but they seem 
powerless to alter its general temper. Recol- 
lection would be out of place early in life, for 
it would lack materials, and wonder is less and 
less to the unregenerate man as he grows older. 
Though a few keep the child-spirit, more cry 
out in the school of Ecclesiastes that there is 
nothing new under the sun. A few, like Pea- 
cock, who remain youthful as long as they can, 
at last weep for their lost possession. 

"The days of youth are days of bloom 
And health and hope and loveliness." 

But this is the lament of those who have loved 
and lost, and not those who possess their 
treasure. 

This inevitableness is according to the order 
of nature and providence. When men's pow- 
131 



132 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

ers begin to slacken and their response to every 
call grows duller, and they act with difficulty, 
if at all, it is not surprising that they dwell 
upon the past when their estate was kingly and 
life was quick and throbbing. It is one of the 
compensations of life to forget present sorrows 
in the afterglow of past victories, as Napoleon 
did at Longwood to kill the monotony of his 
mean existence. Men properly dwell upon the 
grace of the past, though to-day's shadows 
lengthen. 

Moreover, men are driven to recollection 
because steady thought grows harder with the 
weight of years. In full health it requires apt 
circumstances to think wisely about life. Emer- 
son needed everything in the best order before 
he could begin. Health also affects the result. 
Thus reflection belongs to the best and strong- 
est time of life, when, unfettered by ailments, 
and royal over circumstances, men have power 
to take up the life of activity that for the 
moment they have laid down. Indeed, reflec- 
tion is activity of the first order. 

II 

Seeing, then, how predestined recollection is, 
whenever we are met by one of Ben Jonson's 



THE FIELD OF MEMORY 133 

"loud, strong, tedious talkers" we need not lose 
patience, but rather solemnly note one more 
of the stages of life as man passes along its 
highway. 

The time of recollection, however, need not 
make the observer sad, for there are divine 
gifts in it that counterbalance the joys of 
the more active life. 

The man who lives in recollection avoids the 
sting of the mixed interests and agonies of the 
present. Though work has its own wine, the 
exaltation of it is often overcast ; for often we 
cannot find our work, or if we can, we rarely do 
it with singleness of vision or unity of strength. 
The one work that we know we can do is only 
a little of the great labor demanded of us, and 
everybody, whether genius or not, mourns the 
irruption of distasteful tasks, that are distaste- 
ful because we cannot do them well. Some- 
times the men of genius vent their wrath upon 
fools and futility, but common men know the 
same pain. 

The age of memory avoids this sting; for, on 
the one hand, it has no overpowering call to 
do work of a special kind ; and, on the other, it 
can choose its own food for thought. Stand- 



134 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

ing at the goal it can laugh at the hazards of 
the race, and scorn all past terrors ; seeing the 
battle won, indeed, these terrors and perils only 
heighten as in a drama the successful resolution 
of the play. 

Further, these years are joyful because they 
make evident a deeper meaning in the work 
done than could be seen in the moment of its 
doing. When the Protector was in power in 
England and Charles II in exile at Rouen, 
the latter, who looked poorly, as exiles are apt 
to do, gave cause of suspicion to his landlords, 
"who went into the rooms before he went away 
to see whether he had not stole something or 
other/ ' In the same way, men are utterly 
unable to see the dignity of what they are 
doing, or the worth of their fellows, until time 
has made both plain. Providence also becomes 
more visible, as recollection shows the plan and 
urgency of God in the mosaic of the past. 
Surprising portraits abound, but we no more 
saw them than the fly crawling along the lines 
of profile on a portrait sees the startling at- 
tractiveness of the beauty's face. 

In these years men also have the joy of 
reaping the harvest of past work. Hope and 



THE FIELD OF MEMORY 135 

trust were the lights of early life and men are 
willing to plant that others may reap. In later 
life they, too, enter into others' labors. When 
the worker is spared he lives in content in the 
house he built for himself. The student also 
can enjoy what he read in youth better than 
when fiercely acquiring it, for then the pressure 
of knowledge was distracting, and now he can 
ponder. 

So the Christian, sensible of his maimed 
ideal, yet is refreshed in later years as men 
throng about him saying that he had a part in 
forming their characters. Arrows shot at a 
venture pierce the plates of armor, and all of 
us know this blessed truth. Thus a man eats 
of his own planting. Life almost forgotten 
comes to light again, and it is a prophecy of 
immortality, for nothing in God's world is lost. 

Ill 

But there is a necessary introduction to all 
this. It all depends on the kind of life one has 
lived. We have only seen one side of the 
shield; there is another, and that has a dreary 
aspect. Instead of being a foretaste of heaven, 
these years are often the very ante-space of 



i 3 6 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

hell, where huddled souls shiver in torn gar- 
ments, pervious to alternations of passion and 
despair. Agonies, indeed, must have been the 
lot of Judas and men of his temper, who, like 
Mr. Kipling's Tomlinson, are the butts of 
devils for the poor wreck they have made of 
life. Nay, for most of us there are sudden 
tremors that are rheumatic, as we recollect the 
buzz and emptiness of the past. Yes, some- 
thing worthy has to go into life if the years of 
recollection are to be years of joy. 

The first antecedent quality is that of ful- 
ness. One of the awful pains of life is its 
emptiness. This is the last great cry of the 
pessimist, that life is an awful delinquent. So 
long as life is full men laugh at its pains ; they 
even seek them in travel or war ; but empty life 
haunts men like the eyeless sockets of a death's- 
head. Looking down from high places into 
empty space turns many a tourist dizzy, and, 
likewise, looking into an empty life makes men 
sick and fearful. It is not too much to say that 
one of the attractive graces in our Lord's life 
was its fulness, as he exemplified abundant 
life; and the continued attraction of the apos- 
tolic life was no doubt greatly due to infection 



THE FIELD OF MEMORY 137 

with this divine health. "Woe to them that 
are at ease in Zion" is a perennial truth. While 
Herod was ready for suicide, St. Paul was so 
full of the new creation that he could pen 
words that to-day have lost none of their eager 
hopefulness. 

Still, it is not enough that life shall be full. 
It must also be exalted. Its endeavors must be 
high. This joy of recollection is not the least 
worthy : that some failures can give one peace 
and calm. The English Victoria Cross is given 
to all ranks for heroic attempts whether suc- 
cessful or not. Bringing in the slain body of 
a fellow soldier will win it just as much as 
storming and taking a Pathan fortress. To 
have attempted the heroic is much. Calvary 
looked like a defeat to sybarites, but God knew r 
better, and we are now within his knowledge, 
and so we esteem it the one complete victory 
in life. To belong to the innumerable com- 
pany of those who try will afford grateful 
thought in the years of recollection. 

IV 
There are two great themes of Christian 

teaching, each one "endless, deep, profound/' 

that reenforce what has been set forth. 



138 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

One of these is the unforgetfulness of God. 
To use a phrase suited to our humanity, though 
far short of the whole truth, — God recollects. 
His memory never plays him false; for all his 
promises are "yea and amen." The doctrine 
of the judgment, when men are to be tried for 
the deeds done in the body, is one aspect of this 
truth; and the other is the philosophy of his- 
tory obvious in the Scriptures where lesson 
follows lesson on the one great theme of right- 
eousness and salvation. A linked chain "long 
drawn out" is the divine insistence that "thou 
shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy 
God hath led thee these forty years in the 
wilderness." 

The other doctrine is that of immortality. 
Memory does not ultimately fold its wings in 
death. The immortal life is a new and better 
life, but it yet contains the "memories and por- 
traits" of mortality. What a permanent calm 
grows within the man who has walked humbly 
with God! He is not irritably busy pluck- 
ing out the offending members of the past. 
Though with man this is impossible, all things 
are possible with God. 



THE REST THAT REMAINETH 



"'Doth God exact day-labour, light deni'd?' 
I fondly ask: but Patience, to prevent 
That murmur, soon replies, 'God doth not need 
Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best 
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best: his state 
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed, 

And post o'er land and ocean without rest; 
They also serve who only stand and wait.' " 

Milton. 



140 



CHAPTER XI 

THE REST THAT REMAINETH 



Those who are fevered with life find conso- 
lation in the symbols of rest. In literature, 
men have always been attracted to the quieter 
masses of mountain and plain ; no less to water 
in a state of calm. Alpine silences, or lak^s 
that glisten as polished gems, call forth travel- 
ers' praises, and in the Scriptures David sings 
of still waters, and John descries the sea of 
glass. These instances show how men of dif- 
ferent tempers dwell upon the quiet aspects of 
nature and find refreshment in them. Even 
Augustine, who demands intense energy in the 
present life, sees that contemplative calm is the 
reward of those who stand at the goal. 

This desire is a^result of the fever of life, 
that has not simply smitten a few nervous 
souls, but is a taint of human blood since the 
fall of our mighty ancestor. Delirium sees 
lakes and fountains; and men in the clutch of 

. i . 141 



142 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

existence desire the calm that has been known 

in a few rare intervals of life. 

For rest belongs to life in an integral way. 

Years of rest prelude the stern exactions of the 

years of labor. There are rests by the way in 

the severest labors of middle life. And there 

remaineth a rest for God's people after the 

storms and tempest. In childhood, in our 

vacations, and in the evening of life, we have 

these intervals of rest; so did Moses in the 

house of Pharaoh, so did our Lord on Olivet, 

so did Paul in the waiting-room of a Roman 

prison. 

II 

Greatly differing estimates are put upon rest 
by men as they consider these intervals. 

The rest that goes before labor is the theme 
of song. With piety men remember, in their 
sturdiest moments, the vanished days of calm, 
when the wars of kings or the jargon of con- 
gresses hardly made noise enough to disturb 
the imaginary happenings of their own realm 
of fancy. They follow an eighteenth century 
virtuoso who never came across a place visited 
as a boy without a sentimental feeling for what 
was irrevocably gone, — the halcyon calm, as 



THE REST THAT REMAINETH 143 

well as brave imaginings and stout actions. So 
men esteem the memory of rest; they treasure 
its worth, sing its grace and lament its de- 
parture. 

The holidays of middle life are esteemed 
enough to be sought, and when secured, are 
entered upon as boys who are let out of school 
begin their vacations, by profitably thrusting 
into the background the routine cares of life. 
In congratulating our friends who go on a 
holiday, we for the moment almost free our- 
selves from the shackles of strict necessity, 
which eat their acrid way into our tender flesh. 
To come home forever from the daily foreign 
toil, was the experience of a lifetime for 
Charles Lamb, and is ours for a moment as 
we smile through our sympathetic tears at his 
inimitable whim. 

But how differently men reckon the worth of 
the rest of age ! Instead of seeking it they try 
to avoid it, working as long as they can, 
regardless of the lustier work of younger men 
and the pressing needs of the day for the best. 
There have been heartrending cases of men 
keeping on when they should have let go, and 
they have despoiled the fair credit of long 



144 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

years of worthy toil. "There is one glory of 
the sun, and another glory of the moon, and 
another glory of the stars," but to manacle a 
glory in a wrong orbit will only lead to the 
wreck of worlds. The sorriest of us lose some 
of our respect for Bismarck when reading 
Busch, because we see him rejecting the glory 
that was his for one that he never could gain, 
as he refused to retire till crowded out of life. 
The young and the mature should pray daily 
to be kept from the evil of injuring the good 
work of early life by dogged persistence in 
labor when the sun has gone down. 

Ill 

There are several causes for the attempt of 
age to pluck unhandy honors after the day's 
work is over. One grows out of the nature of 
age itself ; the other is founded on the thought- 
lessness of men. 

Age, when most restful, still feels its weak- 
ness. It cannot work as swiftly nor as securely 
as in youth and takes long hours for a trivial 
task. It was very wise of Tennyson, — who 
had the prior example of Goethe before him, — 
to refuse in age to interpret what he wrote in 



THE REST THAT REMAINETH 145 

youth, for he knew that the uncertain touch of 
age would only blur the sharp outlines of 
youth. Sadness that cannot be spoken is the 
feeling of old men and women who strive to 
speak and act as in the stalwart past, but fall 
back helplessly before their task; for it is not 
easy for the leader to go to the rear and allow 
others to plan. And when those once helpful 
have to be a charge upon others, the sadness is 
increased. Nominally the leader is at the head 
of the procession, but in his heart he knows it 
is as Joseph went before Israel, and not as 
Moses led. This accounts for the weak at- 
tempts of old men to keep up with the proces- 
sion, — and it also extenuates their error. 

The other cause is the thoughtlessness of 
men. Old age is another name for isolation. 
In early life — ruddy and stout — one wishes 
to live for ever, but in middle years one begins 
to wonder whether the struggle is worth the 
pains. Old age gradually grows chilled and 
frosted by isolation. It not only fails of the 
joy of work, but it misses the old familiar 
faces, and stares blankly at the truth that "the 
dead are very many and the living very few." 

To be isolated is the highest pitch of sadness. 



146 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

"You are a fortunate man," said Beaconsfield 
to Matthew Arnold; "the young men read 
you ; they no longer read me." This was a bit- 
terness that earl's garters and crosses could not 
cure. It was isolation that wrung from our 
Lord his sharpest cry upon the cross. And 
when isolation is evidenced in brutal thought- 
lessness, as when men trample forward over the 
lives of their betters, there is ground enough, 
I am sure, to make age something querulous, if 
God does not come to its help. 

IV 

God does visit old men, however. They can 
have joy in the years of rest — vicarious joy. 
Perhaps they cry: "I do not want imputed 
worth. I want the real thing. I do not want 
men to honor me for the past, but I want them 
to listen to me now. My judgment is better 
than ever, and as long practice makes perfect, 
what I do now is doubly valuable." 

Those who cry thus forget that vicarious 
worth is the best of all. What is our right- 
eousness but an imputation? And do we not 
more purely rejoice in our children's successes 
than our own? They are purged from base 



THE REST THAT REMAINETH 147 

ambitions, and we assess them in refined gold. 
To enter into another man's joy is the most 
solid of human pleasures, — it is such as the 
angels have as they watch our little successes, 
— and the wonder is that so few try this way 
of enjoyment. So in age, filled with the sight 
of others' works and rewards, our joy comes 
by imputation, like our salvation, but it is none 
the less true. 

Age, then, can be free from crabbedness. 
Indeed it often is, and shows its determination 
to get all it can out of life, vicariously, by its 
praise and blame. 

There is nothing so delightful to youth as a 
sympathetic old man who listens to our tales 
of wonder and gently touches off their folly, 
showing their impossibility or accrediting their 
worth. A word from the "chief" has sent 
many a young diplomat home, walking on air. 
One surmises that the letters of "Paul the 
aged" meant a good deal to Timothy. 

But frequently this sympathy shows its 
faithfulness in blame. So long as it is without 
malice, blame is the sincerest praise — all 
depends on the temper and motive. If I show 
my work to an older man and he blames it, 



148 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

the truth is that he holds me able to do better 
work than I have shown him, and thus he dis- 
cerns better in me than I saw for myself. If 
I had not greater ability than the work mani- 
fests, where were the use of blame? This kind 
of praiseful blame you see in Jowett's letters 
to his pupils. But it is clearest of all in 
Christ's treatment of the Twelve, who often 
had to be shown "what manner of spirit" they 
were of. 

After all, the joy of the aged in the years of 
rest is not wholly vicarious. They often see a 
ripening of their own work in contemporary 
life. They had preached their gospel for years, 
perhaps, and men rejected it; or they stood 
with John the Baptist and saw their disciples 
go to greater masters; or like our Lord they 
saw no fruits of their long travail. But as the 
fruits came to John and to Jesus Christ at Pen- 
tecost, and even in the winter frost and can- 
ker-worm of the great persecutions, so old men 
see of the travail of their souls and are satisfied. 
Yes, they are more than satisfied, for their gos- 
pel was somewhat sour, perhaps, but in later 
contemporary life it has grown clear and high, 
with its roughness worn away and the truth 



THE REST THAT REMAINETH 149 

as clear as sunlight. St. Paul had to wait for 
Augustine, — more, — for Luther, for his vin- 
dication, but it came to stay forever at last. 
We are all safe, — at least the best part of us, 
and that alone is worth saving, — in the hands 
of God. He vindicates the ways of men, when 
men have been just and they have sought the 
true. 

One peculiar joy belongs to age. It has the 
sole right to certainty of the nearness of the 
immortal life, and this alone is an antidote for 
many pains. To the soul, soon to be in the 
timeless state, life looks even less than a fierce 
pulse-beat that shakes through space; and the 
presence of God outlasts all despair. The soul 
in these years is near the unquenchable foun- 
tains, close to the treasure laid up in heaven. 
Almost mischievous must seem worldly activi- 
ties to such as view life under the aspect of 
eternity. But the eyes of the aged saints, tired 
with the backward look over mortality, are 
salved with the calm visions of the eternal 
fatherland. 



THE CHOIR OF HEAVEN 



"Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew 
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, 
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, 

This glorious canopy of light and blue? 

Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, 
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus with the host of heaven came, 

And lo! Creation widened in man's view. 

Who could have thought such darkness lay con- 
cealed 
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find, 

Whilst flow'r and leaf and insect stood revealed, 
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind! 
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife? 
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?" 

Joseph Blanco White. 



152 



CHAPTER XII 

THE CHOIR OF HEAVEN 

I 

It grows harder each year for men who are 
the heirs of "the best that has been thought 
and known" to conceive any such thing as an 
absolute end. The ends of things turn out to 
be but the beginnings of other cycles, where the 
old is not lost but shod with power, — eternally 
conserved. Though apostles cry, "The end of 
all things is at hand," we see, as we stand in 
fuller light, that the marks of decay can be 
interpreted differently. The pains of dissolu- 
tion prove to be birth-pangs of an order better 
in every way, and above all in the very quality 
of permanence that seemed ended forever. 

Precisely the same thought besieges men 
concerning themselves. For the most circum- 
spect have moments of faith that diversify their 
doubt, as they think of the analogies of life. 
Death may not end all. It is just as likely to 
begin a larger activity. 
153 



154 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

This thought, however, which with him took 
on certainty, was in St. Paul's mind as he used 
the figure of the buried grain, which, lost to 
sight and apparently dead, yet was preparing 
the hundredfold miracle of life that summer 
would make plain. And Jesus Christ has 
embodied these feelings and hopes in reality; 
for through him immortality, as well as life, 
has been "brought to light/' 



II 

Now there are certain presuppositions of the 
belief in immortality that appear the moment 
we begin to deal with the subject. 

One is that immortality is not separated in 
a catastrophic way from mortality. On the 
contrary, men more generally conceive of it as 
a continuation of mortality, or a fruition of it, 
rarely as something absolutely divided from it 
by a great gulf. The more truly and devoutly 
men think of mortality, the more, by a spiritual 
necessity, are they driven to think of immortal- 
ity. The ever is always in the now. And so 
the strength of the gift can be imported into 
the present to make it less disorderly. "He 



THE CHOIR OF HEAVEN 155 

that believeth on the Son hath eternal life" 
now. 

The other presupposition is yet more impor- 
tant to us; for it touches a question of the day. 
The hope of immortality shows men unanswer- 
ably that mortality is not an entire failure. To 
hope for a continued life, though better, proves 
the present one not to be irredeemably bad. 
Men may not believe that it is one high mid- 
summer pomp, but at least it is not an irrevo- 
cable winter of discontent, or they would not 
wish for its continuance. Men watch through 
the night because they know the dawn will 
come, and they know that the dawn will come 
because the moving stars have, though weakly, 
the same quality of light that dwells fully in 
the winged victory of morning. So immortal- 
ity is conceived as mortality — but mortality 
at its best — with the accidents left out and the 
essential emphasized. 

Ill 

It need not be surprising, therefore, to any 
one that the idea of immortality has had a 
marked influence upon mortal life. To the 
writer it often seems as if the mortal depended 



156 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

for its most peculiar humanity upon the immor- 
tal. In other words, the immortal life surges 
into the mortal life and makes it what it is in 
glory and graciousness. 

" Without goodness/' says my Lord St. 
Albans, "man is a busy, mischievous, wretched 
thing, no better than a kind of vermin." 
Change "goodness" to "immortality" and you 
have the exact representation of the aimless 
deeds of men — trivial in their length and 
breadth, shallow in their motives, unfitting in 
their fruitfulness. Yes, immortality as an 
enveloping action, puts men in a position to 
see the worth or worthlessness of their daily 
work. Time itself aids us, to-day, as we reckon 
in geologic ages; how much more, then, shall 
the idea of immortality serve us in putting our 
houses in order and furnishing them nobly? 
To imagine ourselves with timelessness at our 
disposal, as we go about our daily work of edi- 
fication, makes the petty ambitions and the 
equally petty pleasures of life seem small. The 
choir of heaven is the furniture of earth. 

Immortality is the ground of men's heroism. 
We need not overestimate it, and yet it seems 
supreme in quality. Why do men suffer, or 



THE CHOIR OF HEAVEN 157 

die; why do prophets risk the stones of the 
mob, and poets seek to quiet the spirits of evil 
in life that if not quieted turn and rend them; 
or why do men preach the truth and willingly 
burn for it ? To this question mortality offers 
no answer. Nothing in its potter's field 
accounts for the finer clay of men like Hosea 
and Amos who lived on sheer heights above it, 
nor does life account for the Baptist, nor for 
St. Paul. 

It is because men were surer of the immortal 
life than of any other that they were ready to 
suffer and die. Otherwise, — 

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
To the last syllable of recorded time; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death." 

A further aspect of worth in the idea of 
immortality is found in its consolations. There 
are those who gird at a pessimistic temper. I 
cannot do that. Sensitive spirits must be stung 
by the disorder of life, — its vast energies and 
empty garners, its unworthy or unrequited 
loves, its fumbling ideas, its hopes so poor and 
trivial. Pascal we have always with us, who 



158 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

perceives in a moment of time the kingdom of 

pain and its writhing subjects, with the temper 

of the strong man who feels because he is 

strong that helplessness is agonizing. Such 

turn away from life and reject it with scorn. 

It is not the noblest way, as Arnold tells us in 

a fine sonnet, but it points to the fact that men 

seek consolation in immortality almost as a 

right, to countervail the cruel might of life. 

And men can afford to wait for their wages. 

They are sure that they will amount to much 

when they are paid. In the meantime the day 

of judgment, which waits upon the new order, 

serves to remind men that they must continue 

instant in work. 

IV 

The question surely arises as we go on: 
What is immortality, or what goes into this 
great idea? 

For the majority of men who think about it, 
first of all, it is freedom. As Mr. Watson sug- 
gests, man is not always ^ure whether he is a 
guest or a prisoner upon this earth. Some- 
times he feels that he is the King's son; at 
others he is rudely shocked by the stern 
demands of nature for the uttermost farthing 



THE CHOIR OF HEAVEN 159 

and the last drop of blood. At the best, in his 
moments of gaiety, the day of reckoning is not 
far off. He hears the muffled tones of law, as 
you hear Godwin's muffled voice in Caleb Wil- 
liams. He feels the fetters of necessity. And 
the maddening joy of the victor at the goal is 
dashed as he remembers the cloud of silent yet 
opposing witnesses that nearly vanquished his 
spirit. 

There are limits, too, within ourselves, that 
we know will prove their finiteness in some 
inopportune and bitter way, while others are 
prophesying a certain success. We may hide 
the vulnerable spot from men, but we are sen- 
sitive ourselves to its rankling pain, and it 
makes us halt and lame. 

This falls away from us as we consider 
immortality. Its ample air invigorates us and 
we grow strong even in contemplation of it. 
Immortality is not this killing sense of oppres- 
sion and wounds, of the tug and stress of 
antagonistic forces, or the death wrestle of the 
two minds, but it is a land of far horizons and 
the permanent sun. 

The last figure suggests a second quality in 
th« idea of immortality, that of clearness. 



i6o STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

Cloudlessness is its divine aspect. In the 
struggles of earth, for long ages men have 
been trying to see things as they are. The 
"thing-in-itself" is what German metaphysi- 
cians sought, or only unavailingly found, to 
sell by auction as worthless after its discovery. 

Though we now see truth obscurely, then we 
shall see its very face. Our view will be better 
than Shelley's "cloudless, boundless, human 
view," because it will be divine. And to the 
thinker there will be an end of the tantalizing 
question, Am I on the right road? For all 
ways will lead to the truth then, though one 
must needs traverse them. The mortal fear 
that after I have labored my labor will be in 
vain, is inconceivable in the immortal life. It 
is a frequent fact in mortality. 

Still, perhaps, the greatest joy is that of 
companionship. Men do not care to be as free 
as Crusoe; they would be willing to have their 
fellows with them even at the price of a "social 
contract" that clips their freedom. Nor do 
they wish to wander in a world of unimpas- 
sioned abstractions. They crave companion- 
ship as the summit of earthly joy. 

This enters into the idea of immortality. 



THE CHOIR OF HEAVEN 161 

The Jews conceived it as being "in Abraham's 
bosom"; the apostles as being with Christ, 
which is far better; and all men, of late, as 
being with God. The spirits of just men made 
perfect, and the angels of little children who 
always behold the face of God, are the two 
antipodes of being, waiting to welcome man 
into the presence of God. Men then will enjoy 
God; for perfect love will cast out fear. And 
they will rest in the unbroken rapture of son- 
ship, as the Fatherhood of God swallows up all 
earthly conceptions of his sovereignty. 



We pause for a moment, as a man might 
awaken from a dream, to ask ourselves, Is it 
true? Are there not frequent and sinister 
questions as to the defects of our speculation? 
There are; and there must be. 

One question is that which concerns the 
silence of the lost. Is this immortality for all 
men or only some? There are inclusive souls 
who seek further than the word of Scripture 
and go behind the reticence of our Lord, who 
believe that ultimately God will bring all men 
into this blessedness. One may indulge in a 



162 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

"larger hope" after one has done all that can 
be done to save men and to bring them to joy. 
That, however, belongs to God. The duty of 
man is to leave no effort untried, so that men 
may be saved in peace. Who has a right to a 
"larger hope" when he neglects a small one? 
Who shall say that he has done all that he can 
to save men, and thus leave the blame with 
God, if blame there be, for their loss? And 
what perfidious double-dealer has a right to 
any hope, who goes on sinning "that grace 
may abound" ? One may love a man and yet 
strip him, yea, he himself would agree that 
love should be vindicated. These souls, like 
our own, are safe with God, who will do 
justly. 

The other questions are those of speculative 
and esthetic import, and both have been bril- 
liantly treated by Professor James. "If the 
brain," so runs one, "is the organ of conscious- 
ness, how can consciousness survive its death?" 
The answer suggested is that the brain may 
not only function consciousness, but transmit 
it as well, and consciousness may thus be 
behind it and outlast it. 

The esthetic question concerns the intoler- 



THE CHOIR OF HEAVEN 163 

able sense of oppression produced by the idea 
of the innumerable souls of an immortal 
humanity: How can there be room for them 
in the universe? The answer is, that con- 
sciousness is not spatial, and that an overflow- 
ing sense of it is enlarging instead of belittling. 
The world is a bigger world to the man of 
thought, who sees its unnumbered relations, 
than to the man who thinks by deputy and 
shouts with the multitude. Another's soul 
never crowds mine, — it is rather a soulless 
world that would be most tightly oppressive. 

VI 

The most pertinent theme is rather how 
immortality may be obtained. This has been 
a frequent question with men. And their 
answers have been many. 

Some have thought that abstinence from 
mortality was the surest way to immortality. 
The monks of the East as well as the West 
held this to be the answer. It was also the 
Rabbinic idea finding expression most clearly, 
perhaps, in the ritual of the Sabbath. Though 
one may admire the ruthless way these spiritual 
heroes divested themselves of their properties 



164 STUDIES IN CONDUCT 

in order to race for immortality, one feels its 
inadequacy. While the evidences of immortal- 
ity are, in general, found in the social con- 
sciousness, and while the virtues that make for 
immortality are also those that cannot exist in 
isolation, that is no reasonable ground for the 
ascetic view of life. 

Nor can we be assured of the possession of 
immortality by the practice of insight. The 
sharpest eyes cannot see what does not exist. 
So men cannot gain immortality by sight, 
though they may need vision to see it after it 
is gained. The mystic is abnormal both in the 
immortality he seeks, and the life that he lives, 
while the immortal life is more normal than 
mortality whose grace and fashion often 
change. Hence the men of heroic insight 
have come perilously near to losing their indi- 
viduality, for, flooded with the waves of 
feeling that rise upon the shores of indiscrim- 
inate thought, there remains, after the ebb, 
only the wrinkled sand, and personal identity 
is lost forever. 

Still less conceivable is it that men can grow 
into it. At the best, the span of life is very 
short, and some hardly breathe ere they are 



THE CHOIR OF HEAVEN 165 

again enfolded in the being of God. Who, 
then, has time to perfect himself in the art of 
the immortal life? We might expect mere age 
to make a man wise, when, on the contrary, it 
often stratifies his stupidity. Most of us are 
wiser with God's wisdom when we are little 
children, than when older. After six thousand 
years the race has not come far in other re- 
spects. No, it does not grow into immortality. 
We thus are driven to the Scriptures which 
affirm the immortal life to be by the grace of 
God. This grace comes through Jesus Christ. 
Sanctification, which is the equivalent for 
immortality with most of us (for we cannot 
conceive of a holy life being lost on the shore- 
less wilds of chaos), is ethical and ritual in 
Jesus Christ. He is the High Priest who 
saves us by his eternal offering, and he is the 
Captain of salvation who leads us forward in 
the way of the immortal life. The fact of 
immortality is accomplished in heaven; its art 
in the school of discipleship. Art and nature 
meet in one in the life of every son or 
daughter of the household. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2005 

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